Deep History of Warfare

[Jnyusa]

First I wrote: Genghis Kahn.

I’ve seen his name spelled about ten different ways. We would probably find it unpronouncable.

I have a very hard time accepting the figure of 20 million killed in Northern China by Genghis Khan.

I did a little thumbnail calculation, based on an educated guess for world population doubling rates. There could have been 100 million people living in China at that time; and the armies don’t have to kill 20 million for 20 million to die with the disruption of farming, the spread of disease, etc. However, the one book that I have here to consult says the campaign in northern China lasted only two years and the one city where people were slaughtered was Peking. Is it possible, Lord M., that 20 million over ten years might represent the sum total of the Khan’s campaigns? The practice of slaughtering whole cities did continue along the Silk Road.

They often burned cities that they captured, tore up farmland, and Genghis Khan’s initial campaign in Northern China killed twenty million. Even after they had gone through China and Persia, they were still raiders. Subotai Ba’adur laid waste to Armenia without thought of settling there, and Ogotai razed Buda.

And Tamarlane’s campaign was the same kind of story ...

They adapted to a settled lifestyle afterward, but they were certainly nomads at first.

.. but I do feel the rest of this explanation is inadequate. Just as nomads obtain their metalwork through trade (more about that in a moment), they usually use trade centers for their administrative needs as well. They don’t carry scribes around with them.

From the biographies of the Khan that I’ve read, he was not educated himself in administration.

See, I’ve read the opposite - not about his education but about his administrative abilities. Some people come by that naturally. He was a known ruler in the region even before he began his campaign. The campaign itself would have been phenomenal to organize ... (there was, for example, a retinue of people and a team of two dozen oxen needed just to transport his yurt) ... it’s almost fair to say that Khan carried a city around with him as he crossed the steppes. I think it likely that the society of Mongolia had evolved to this point before Khan set out to conquer the world. He himself was already head of a fairly vast organization and his personal court may not have been nomadic even though herding was still the main economic activity of his people.

However, to the Chinese and to the western Moslem satrapies, all of which had well-educated rulers and a highly refined civil service system, Khan and his sons would have seemed dolts.

Another question that strikes me is the interest the Mongolians would have had in the city kingdoms of Central Asia. If conquering a wide swath of pasturage is the only motivation, then it makes more sense to cross the Altai and head west, but Khan deployed his sons and generals to the main cities of the Silk Road, east and west, and he didn’t stop until he hit the other end of it, so to speak (Moscow). This suggests to me a particular motivation and a particular kind of diplomatic familiarity with the lands he was entering.

You can see this in the way that they ran their Empire – to put it bluntly, they didn’t. It had begun to collapse into small Khanates even before Genghis Khan died.

That was also characteristic of the Alexandrian and Moslem administrations installed in Central Asia. More land was taken than could be administered by one person from one place and it was customary to give what amounted to autonomous kingdoms as a reward to generals. Central Asia was composed of city kingdoms, which were basically intact from before Alexander to the end of the Timurid Dynasty. Only the ethnicity of the ruler changed with conquest.

It was common for nomads to have a special trading relationship with certain nearby settled peoples.

Yes! This is the relationship I wanted to get at. There existed a trade relationship between pastoralists and the towns and it was not in the interest of either to disrupt it by internecine warfare. The typical relationship between them is not that suggested by conventional theory, where the pastoralists are raiding adjacent settlements because of mutual encroachment.

Most nomads, though, were semi-nomadic.

Well, then it’s a misnomer. But I know what you mean ...

The Sarmatians were able to deck out their nobles in shiny suits of scale mail because they controlled a number of towns, such as the trading centre of Tanais at the mouth of the Volga.

Then we are talking about traders, or people who are ‘attached to’ a trade route with a specific complementary economic function to perform ...

The Scythians were often nomadic during the summer and settled during the winter.

... probably with a defined territory and boundary agreements or recognized routes that were honored by other tribes of the region and by the settlements; rights of use and passage are quite common ...

The Yuezhi had permanent settlements at the oases of the Tamalakan Desert.

... which were also trade centers ... I have to explain something about the ‘parts’ of a trade route to make all of the above relationships clearer and it has to do with what you and vison asked about the Vikings so I’ll save it for over the weekend, if you don't mind.

Still, there are plenty of cases of nomads settling in cities, and very few of city folk taking up nomadism.

What I am suggesting is that some, possibly most of the tribes that we consider nomadic might be more accurately characterized as “settled where they came from,” at the very least in the sense that I would consider the Sarmations (whom I know only from your description above) to have been settled in their region in spite of their economic function being herding. Or possibly they provided defense of the trade route - another profession that might look like a semi-nomadic lifestyle but is not similar at all to pastoralism.

The Hebrews have been characterized by some anthropologists as invading nomads and I am reasonably confident that we were not nomadic while living in Iraq but moved between nearby pastures as we did in the Levant. The Roma today are considered nomadic by the countries that host them, though anthropologists strongly suspect that their origin is urban Punjabi and that they came from a privileged caste.

When people pack up and move permanently to another region, that is a migration. That’s what allowed humans to cover the earth, so of course its importance should not be downplayed. But it is not the same as nomadism, to my thinking. Migration is an event, not a lifestyle. In most cases, anyway, the people hope that it does not become a lifestyle.

Or maybe you and I do have the same conception and I simply don’t like the word ‘nomad’ because this implies something different to me. I don’t think of a traveling salesman as a nomad, nor a transmigrant nor refugee. Ranchers in the U.S. do move their cattle between summer and winter pasture and there are ranch workers who follow the herds and set up temporary camps. Migrant farm workers travel with the seasonal crops. But I don’t think of any of them as nomads; this is not quite the right label in my mind. But probably some people do think of them that way, at least metaphorically.

Like I said earlier, I am just suspicious of this term and have doubts whether anyone in history has actually fit the word as we usually employ it.

I get most of my information from playing computer games

LOL, I’m sure not.

Jn

eta: I should add that my only source of information about the Roma comes from following wikipedia links outward, since wikipedia is not always accepted as trustworthy. I was reading about the Roma a few weeks ago for a reason unrelated to this topic and they popped into mind when you mentioned settled people who had become nomads.

[Túrin Turambar]

I’ve seen his name spelled about ten different ways. We would probably find it unpronouncable.

And, of course, it isn’t even his name. It’s a title – ‘Great King’ (which I guess many of you know, it’s just a fun fact for those who don’t). His name was Temuchin (or Temujin). The trouble with Mongolian is that many sounds are somewhere between sounds in English. For example, there is sound halfway between ‘ch’ and ‘j’ which features in Temuchin’s name, meaning that it can be spelt with either a ch or j in English (even though it is pronounced as neither). There is a similar sound halfway between ‘t’ and ‘d’, which explains why you see the name of Genghis Khan’s general spelt Subotai Ba’atur, Subodai Ba’adur, Subedi Ba’adur, ect.

While we’re on the subject of names of historical figures, here’s another fun fact – Saladin’s real name was Joe. OK, his name was actually Yusuf Ibn Ayyub, which is the Arabic equivalent of Joseph, son of Job. So, Joe . He took on the title ‘Salah-ah-Din’ (Defender of the Faith) when he began his Jihad against the Crusader States. This was Latinised as Saladin.

There could have been 100 million people living in China at that time; and the armies don’t have to kill 20 million for 20 million to die with the disruption of farming, the spread of disease, etc. However, the one book that I have here to consult says the campaign in northern China lasted only two years and the one city where people were slaughtered was Peking. Is it possible, Lord M., that 20 million over ten years might represent the sum total of the Khan’s campaigns?

The initial campaign went for two years and ended with the sack of Beijing. Ghenghis Khan then needed to deal with the usurper Kushluk and the Kharakhitai, before returning to China to continue his war against the Xia and Jin. All in all, he spent ten years there before embarking on his campaign in Persia.

The usual source for Chinese casualties is individual reports combined with census data, which is good by medieval standards but still not fully accurate. Still, it gives us a general idea of the losses.

From the biographies of the Khan that I’ve read, he was not educated himself in administration.

See, I’ve read the opposite - not about his education but about his administrative abilities.

He was a naturally gifted leader, but not educated in Administration. He was aided, though, by the fact that he was naturally racially and religiously tolerant – he was quite willing to work with anyone who had expertise rather than simply planting Mongol Governors who probably wouldn’t have a clue in the regions of his Empire. He was also a meritocrat – he came from fairly humble origins himself and thus was willing to believe that others not of noble birth could be good leaders and administrators. It wasn’t enough of an administrative structure to hold the Empire together, but it worked where it was applied.

Another question that strikes me is the interest the Mongolians would have had in the city kingdoms of Central Asia. If conquering a wide swath of pasturage is the only motivation, then it makes more sense to cross the Altai and head west, but Khan deployed his sons and generals to the main cities of the Silk Road, east and west, and he didn’t stop until he hit the other end of it, so to speak (Moscow). This suggests to me a particular motivation and a particular kind of diplomatic familiarity with the lands he was entering.

His motivation is hard to guess.

We know that he felt that he was the rightful ruler of the world. We know that he felt that the Mongols should fight other people rather than fight among themselves, and that they needed to fight, being a warrior people (as they believed) descended from the grey wolf. We know that he wanted resources for his people beyond what Mongolia had to offer. This might explain the erratic nature of his conquests. In many cases, he attacked and laid waste Empires that didn’t want to treat with him and killed his ambassadors (the fate of the Kwarzharmin Empire). In others, he launched destructive raids for no apparent reason other than to seek booty and enforce his authority. In some cases, he sought to rule cities he conquered. In others, he simply destroyed them. He initially had a thing against settled peoples in general, which appears to have been something of a wide-ranging Mongol cultural bias. This is part of what I was suggesting earlier – even though there are plenty of relationships between nomads and settled peoples, there is often an underlying mistrust of the others’ lifestyle.

By the end of his life, though, the Khan was beginning to understand that the Mongols might seek a sedentary lifestyle in the lands that they had ridden over earlier, and began to plan for a proper Mongol Empire.

[Jnyusa]

He initially had a thing against settled peoples in general, which appears to have been something of a wide-ranging Mongol cultural bias. This is part of what I was suggesting earlier – even though there are plenty of relationships between nomads and settled peoples, there is often an underlying mistrust of the others’ lifestyle

.

(My bold)

Yes, I quite agree. This is part of the cultural predisposition I am trying to get at. It runs both ways and is one factor among many in a complex fabric of economic and cultural interrelationships. When those relationships erupt into war we have a tendency to reduce the motivation of the 'other' to simplistic terms, to this one dimension of difference between us - they are nomadic and warlike, we are settled and peaceful.

This picture is not adequate because in times of peace - using the medieval configuration as example - our access to the main artery of trade depends on the warrior (defense) and herding (transport) knowledge of those people whom we call nomadic, and their access depends on the currency systems, letters of credit, and diplomatic relationships maintained among the multiplicity of cities along the route.

My preferred explanation for some of these seemingly inscrutable events is to ask what was the aggressor's relationship to the main artery of trade and what if anything had happened to shrug them off to the periphery and curtail or eliminate their access. Or perhaps their ambition was to change their economic role in trade because of changes in their own economy, and this could only be accomplished by altering their geographic relationship to the route, i.e. by migrating into new regions and conquering them if necessary.

By the end of his life, though, the Khan was beginning to understand that the Mongols might seek a sedentary lifestyle in the lands that they had ridden over earlier, and began to plan for a proper Mongol Empire.

Within the lands he conquered, I think it probable that the main occupation remained herding. That is, if you looked at the ordinary Mongols who traveled with Khan's campaign and 'settled' in Russia, you would find their pastoralist economy re-enacted. It would be this second tier of administrative capability, that seems to have evolved up to a point in Mongolia before the campaign, which would have evolved even further and taken on the problems of Empire.

Going back to the first point, I will develop this idea more when I find a moment to write about the Vikings, but this is my preferred approach to analyzing the current Middle East crisis as well. Access to the silk road is no longer the driving force of the world economy but there is another resource out there, access to which represents the life and death of every economy in the world. We talk about about oil quite casually as being behind all these wars, but fail to appreciate perhaps the ambiguous motivations that this creates.

Wars of access are wars in which there are as many sides as there are parties to the war, because anyone who emerges as clear victor becomes an automatic threat to everyone else. The goal is not only to form alliances and win things for yourself but to simultaneously keep your allies from winning too much for themselves.

Jn

[ToshoftheWuffingas]

Famine and disease kill far more in warfare than sharp edges.

[eborr]

I know very little about what went on in the barbarian, lands and that ignorance is not unique, we as Lord M has said are entirely reliant on foriegn writings so the Mongol empire was technically a proto-historic society, much the same as the celts prior to the Roman expansion.
I must admit being tempted to quote the cliche "the only accurate lesson from history is not to take lessons from history", however that is not a sensible approach, as has been admirably demonstrated by Messrs Bush and Blair.

I am always troubled by the application of modern notions and behavious on the ancients, that is not to say that we cannot describe ancient society using modern terms, although let's not have any barbarians socialising with flagons of mead.

Seems to me that there are certain behaviours that are pretty common to us as a species, the need for food, water, to reproduce, and when those needs are put under the stress of the absence of the above then they will behave in an agressive manner, unless that involves a greater threat. It is also clear that there is a strong instinct to exist is groups and the recognition that we prosper by co-operating.

Once we move beyond the general instincts, I become less happy about our attempts to understand the ancients.

Are nomadic societies warlike - maybe or maybe it;s simply that by being war-like they got a bigger press. IKf you take the case of the San of Southern Africa, they and the Koi-Koi cousins were about as nomadic as they come, but the notion of conflict is entirely foriegn to them, that is a major factors, in their being forced to move from the temperate and rich lands of the Cape, through Griqualand, and eventually settling in the Kgalagari desert.

Similalry questions such as hunters tend to be more accurate shots that people who don;t hunt is stating the obvious

[eborr]

Famine and disease kill far more in warfare than sharp edges.

perhaps we should remind airlines of this with reference to the threats posed by their in-flight food

[Jnyusa]

Seems to me that there are certain behaviours that are pretty common to us as a species, the need for food, water, to reproduce, and when those needs are put under the stress of the absence of the above then they will behave in an agressive manner, unless that involves a greater threat. It is also clear that there is a strong instinct to exist is groups and the recognition that we prosper by co-operating.

Yes, I think that these are the premises from which we have to begin. Where basic needs are concerned, motivations are going to be pretty much the same among all Peoples and throughout history.

Going beyond that to characterize a culture as this thing or that thing demands a great deal of evidence, which in most cases we don't have.

Once we move beyond the general instincts, I become less happy
about our attempts to understand the ancients.

I think it is possible for an honest researcher to approach the available data without preconceptions and arrive at some conclusions as to pattern; and then if those patterns are repeated in other places and other times we can start to build a picture of the forces that act on cultures.

But even when we have written histories it can be tough to figure out what really motivated people ... it's hard enough to figure out what Parliament or the US Senate thinks it's doing. When we ask what Attila or Khan thought they were doing we're just tossing guesses into the wind.

The hardest thing to do is to accept that counterfactual evidence means that a theory is inadequate. We make our livings off defensible theories and it's tempting to disregard whatever doesn't fit when the evidence is so slight to begin with. Or we just absorb the contradiction and try not to teach both facts in the same breath, so as to avoid alerting our students to our confusion.

Jn

[axordil]

Yes, the Plains Indians subsisted this way.

Only after about 1600, when they had acquired sufficient horses from the Spanish and rebuilt their societies around them. In the millenia before then their culture was, one suspects, somewhat different.

edit--missed Vison's post the first time through.

[Jnyusa]

Yes, I stand corrected. Though I think that the alternative would have been even more difficult - running alongside a herd and shooting while running? or attempting to bring down one buffalo with a hail of arrows from a distance before the herd is startled away? If they seized on the horse it probably represented an advantage rather than a disadvantage.

I don't know how they managed it. But they've got archeological sites from the distant ancestors who brought down wooly mammoths the old-fashioned way - groups of men on foot with stone spears. It's incredible, really.

Anyway, the fact that 'weapons' were initially developed for finding food was the only thing I wanted to clarify. Like eborr said, pretty much everything is about food.

Jn

[Túrin Turambar]

I don't know how they managed it.

I believe that one of their tricks was to induce buffalo herds to stampede off cliffs. Else, they would have probably stalked them from downwind with bows and spears.

[Jnyusa]

I believe that one of their tricks was to induce buffalo herds to stampede off cliffs.

Aha!

Else, they would have probably stalked them from downwind with bows and spears.

Yes, I was thinking too about the difficulty of bringing down a buffalo with a stone or bone weapon. The amount of work involved in killing, skinning, butchering just to obtain food this way is kind of staggering.

Jn

[vison]

At this point, I recommend Jean Auel's awful books. The technical bits are wonderful.

There is at least one place in Canada called "Buffalo Jump" and the first name for Winnipeg was "Pile of Bones". Even when they had horses they used the cliff method, since the cliffy spots were on the buffalo's route.

Hunting from horseback was probably not the real advantage, but the speed of a horse, or a group of men on horses, was a real advantage. in finding, following, and then chasing the buffalo. Still, we must remember that the Apaches commonly caught wild horses by running them down; it was often Apache women who did it. A man or woman can outrun a horse, having greater endurance. Horses cannot gallop for long, unlike the image you get from movies. (It takes days to run down a horse, just the same.)

The horse, in the hands of the tribes who first utilized them, changed the traditional territories of the Plains Indians. Those with horses were able to drive the horseless tribes out. So, this actually fits quite well with the subject at hand.

I've seen a man butcher a cow using stone tools such as the Plains Indians would have had before they had metal. A stone knife can be very, very sharp, and of course the man knew his business, as his ancestors would have known theirs.

[Frelga]

Another question that strikes me is the interest the Mongolians would have had in the city kingdoms of Central Asia. If conquering a wide swath of pasturage is the only motivation, then it makes more sense to cross the Altai and head west, but Khan deployed his sons and generals to the main cities of the Silk Road, east and west, and he didn’t stop until he hit the other end of it, so to speak (Moscow). This suggests to me a particular motivation and a particular kind of diplomatic familiarity with the lands he was entering.

There are couple points worth addressing in this paragraph.

First, The Silk Road didn't end in Moscow. It led from China to the Mediterranean ports, from where the goods were taken on by ships to European ports.

Moscow itself was of little importance at the time. It was the Mongol invasion that led (or accelerated, depending on who you ask) the breakdown of the Kiyevan Rus and rise of Muskovia as the center for future unification.

Second, the Khan didn't get to Moscow or in fact invaded Russia in his lifetime. His generals dealt Slavic princes a crushing defeat on Kalka River in 1223, but that was when the Slavs came to the aid of their neighbors and usual enemies Kypchaks. In fact, he offered them a non-aggression treaty first. Whether he meant to keep it is an open question, but as Mstislav of Kiev executed his ambassadors I think we can give the Khan a benefit of doubt. In spite of the decisive victory, the Khan called off his forces.

The actual invasion began over a decade later, after the Khan's death. Apparently, the Khan's successors followed his master plan. In economic terms what he was after was not pasturelands, nor control of the trade routes specifically, except as of course they were important for the military campaigns and communications. He was after tribute. The tribute allowed him to support his army and the army enforced tribute collection.

While the Mongols burned through most major cities, they left no occupying force behind. That was, perhaps, the brilliance of Khan's policy. He largely left the conquered people to their self-government and their religion, and crushed any attempts at resistance with brutal punitive raids. So, while the Northern Kniazhestva (principalities) agreed to pay the tribute, they were left free to resist the threat from the Teuton Knights, who were after outright annexation and forceful conversion to Catholic religion. Meanwhile, the Mongols were often "invited" to take sides in the intercine wars between the Slavic Princes.

I believe that one of their tricks was to induce buffalo herds to stampede off cliffs. Else, they would have probably stalked them from downwind with bows and spears.

That makes sense. From what I read, most people for whom hunting was a major food source relied on trapping or ambushing their prey in some way.

[Jnyusa]

First, The Silk Road didn't end in Moscow. It led from China to the Mediterranean ports, from where the goods were taken on by ships to European ports.

No, the Silk Road did end in the area we call Moscow. My 'so to speak' was shorthand for a longer explanation that I thought too tangential in my previous post.

The main trade artery of the world, part of which was called the Silk Road, went as you said overland to the Med, then it got on a boat and stopped at southern European ports if it was a Greek boat and North African ports if it was a Phoenician boat. It passed through the straits and out into the Atlantic and went North if it was a Greek boat and south if it was a Phoenician boat. The northern seaway, which is the one of interest here, entered the English Channel and traded at the mouth of what is now the Bourne, then returned to southern Europe, Greece and the Levant. The goods traded in Bourne, however, also went across the Channel on British boats or overland across English where they got on a Norse boat at the Humber river and were carried either to what we now call Amsterdam and Hamburg and from there down into Europe, or up over the Danish penninsula and into the Baltic. The route crossed the Baltic and on the other side the trade went overland again and ended in the region of Moscow.

I am using the modern names for these places to make the picture understandable. There is no evidence that the tribes who controlled different portions of the route were unified in any way. And there were many branches off this route, of course, taking different forms depending on geography. The portion that begins in Amsterdam and goes south to the Alps was called the Salt Road. But the main identifable artery went from Chang'an in China to the region north of Moscow by way of the Med, the Channel, the North Sea, the Baltic etc.

The entire route in this form existed intact at least three thousand years ago that we know of (by tracing the necessary origin of goods found in places like Denmark and Russia); and for the Silk Road portion of it, which as you said stretched from China to the Med, we have written records of trade going back 6000 years.

Moscow itself was of little importance at the time. It was the Mongol invasion that led (or accelerated, depending on who you ask) the breakdown of the Kiyevan Rus and rise of Muskovia as the center for future unification.

Yes, I've been speaking rather loosely of the Khan meaning the whole Mongol campaign. I did not, in truth, look up where and when he himself died. My maps show the area of Mongol rule to have stretched as far west as Kiev and well north of Moscow to the latitude of St. Petersburg.

I would like to recall that the reason Khan came into the discussion was because we were asking whether 'nomads' go the war because of settlements encroaching on their pastures. This is clearly not the case with the Mongol campaign. Bukhara, Samarkand, Merv and the northwest regions of Russia - none of these encroached on Mongolia. But they do fit another known pattern, being critical places along a trade artery, and it is in that direction that I wanted to point our noses because the Moslem expansion focused on many of those same points.

Jn

edited to fix quote

[axordil]

I've been to Head Smashed In Buffalo Jump in Alberta. I recommend it highly...even the interpretive center is cool, being built half in and half out of the cliff. You take an escalator up to the top (it's a cliff after all) and wander down through the exhibits.

BTW, buffalo tend to winter in forested areas where the snow isn't as thick. This makes them a lot easier to hunt with short ranged weapons. The jumps were for the summer. The predecessors of the Blackfoot people seem to have had a permanent campsite at the jump where they could process hundreds of kills at a time, and then had winter camps near the forests to the south and west.

That's what I remember from my visit. That and the story of how the place got its name...seems the son of a chief wanted to see what the spectacle looked like from underneath and climbed halfway up...you can fill in the rest.

[Frelga]

No, the Silk Road did end in the area we call Moscow. <...> But the main identifable artery went from Chang'an in China to the region north of Moscow by way of the Med, the Channel, the North Sea, the Baltic etc.

I see. You are counting the oversea portion of the route. In that sense, yes, Asian goods ended up in Slavic principalities, although I don't think it's accurate to say that the caravans set out with that destination in mind. (FTR, Novgorod Republic would be the most important power in that area at the time, that).

As an aside, there did exist another important trade route, known as the way from Varyags to Greeks. It followed along the great rivers from the Baltic to Black Sea.

Back to the point at hand - I don't recall any evidence that the Khan or his immediate successors showed any interest in controlling the sea trade.

I did not, in truth, look up where and when he himself died. My maps show the area of Mongol rule to have stretched as far west as Kiev and well north of Moscow to the latitude of St. Petersburg.

That is correct. Here's a good map that shows the relevant area. A couple of points here are that

a) this map covers the century after the Khan's death. During his life, his empire stretched only a little West of the Kaspian Sea.

b) much of this area was under Mongolian rule only insofar as it was obliged to pay tribute. From 1250s on, even the collection of the tribute was entrusted to the local officials. This is cardinally different from how think of Roman or British Empires, which established some forms of colonial governments, awarded lands to the conquering soldiers, etc.

I would like to recall that the reason Khan came into the discussion was because we were asking whether 'nomads' go the war because of settlements encroaching on their pastures. This is clearly not the case with the Mongol campaign. Bukhara, Samarkand, Merv and the northwest regions of Russia - none of these encroached on Mongolia. But they do fit another known pattern, being critical places along a trade artery, and it is in that direction that I wanted to point our noses because the Moslem expansion focused on many of those same points.

Right. I understood your take to be that control or access to the trade arteries was an important motivation for the Mongolian conquest.

My point was that the primary motivation for the Mongolian conquest was, well, the conquest. As I said before, economically, the Khan was after tribute, or IOW, plunder. Their infrastructure was optimized, not to control or access the trade, but to calculate and collect the tribute. He (and/or his successors) instituted population census, post, and indeed brought back the Silk Road from disarray that followed the collapse of Roman Empire.

As far as "critical places along a trade artery" - I suspect the Mongols attacked those places for the same reason that gangster guy robbed the banks - because that's where the money is. Or more specifically, because that's where there were centers of resistance to crush, wealth to plunder and high-density population to enslave or tax.

[Túrin Turambar]

I agree with Frelga on this point:

My point was that the primary motivation for the Mongolian conquest was, well, the conquest.

I do not think it is especially significant that both the Arabs and Mongols expanded towards the towns on the silk road. I think that looking at them as calculating peoples trying to gain an upper hand by seizing control of the major trans-Asian trade route is reading too much into the situation.

The Silk Road towns were at the northern extreme of the Sassanid Empire. Once the Arabs invaded the Sassanid Empire, it was only natural that they would expand over its entire territory. They were, after all, setting out to win land and converts for their Empire and religion, and once they had overrun the major Sassanid power-base in Mesopotamia there was nothing really stopping them from flowing north over the Iranian plateau. Do not forget that they also tried to expand into Europe via the east and west, where they were thwarted by the Byzantines and Franks respectively. They would taken the Frankish and Byzantine Empires if they could – they did not fail to do so for lack of desire to.

As to the Mongols, they had only two real Empires in their area worth attacking (and they were after settled Empires, for the reasons Frelga pointed out). After China, Genghis Khan took an interest in Persia, by sending emissaries to the Kwarazham Shah. When the Shah killed his emissaries, he attacked. Was he after control of trade routes? I don’t think so, only to prove to the Kwarazham Empire that the Mongols were not simply run-of-the-mill nomads whom they could pay no heed to (and to get the riches of Samarkand and more land to add to their Empire).

[Jnyusa]

.. although I don't think it's accurate to say that the caravans set out with that destination in mind.

Yes, I doubt that traders on one part of the route knew where the whole route went, but they knew the points between which they themselves travelled, and that was more than the settled peoples generally knew.

..FTR, Novgorod Republic ...

Thank you! I wanted to say Novgorod but I'm always afraid I have that name confused with something else. There are three districts, I believe, in the northwest of Russia that share cultural origin and are culturally distinct from the region of Moscow? And they are the historic traders, Russia's 'window on the west.' I had heard that there was some talk of autonomy recently for Novgorod, or a dispute with Moscow over insufficient tax monies being returned to the region ... I'm sorry now that I can't remember all the details. It was a couple years ago that I read this.

... much of this area was under Mongolian rule only insofar as it was obliged to pay tribute ...My point was that the primary motivation for the Mongolian conquest was, well, the conquest. As I said before, economically, the Khan was after tribute, or IOW, plunder. Their infrastructure was optimized, not to control or access the trade, but to calculate and collect the tribute. He (and/or his successors) instituted population census, post, and indeed brought back the Silk Road from disarray that followed the collapse of Roman Empire ... As far as "critical places along a trade artery" - I suspect the Mongols attacked those places for the same reason that gangster guy robbed the banks - because that's where the money is.

I don't disagree with any of this, but it does not preclude a slightly more sophisticated background than what we are used to attributing to the Mongol Conquest.

Portions of the main trade artery would open or close at various times in history for all sorts of reasons: dynasties would change, drought and famine hit the agricultural circles, disease struck cities ... life as we know it happened. The willingness of the Chinese to keep the route open was particularly unpredictable. One dynasty would be interested in trade and the next would be autarkic and isolationist.

When the route closed, there were always some people hurt by this more than others. This generally has to do with economic function. The service sector always goes first - physical transport, translators, accountants, guys providing protectia to the physical transport, etc. The other people hurt differentially are those located at the geographic termini of branches off the main route. Central Asia and the Med might recover fairly quicky from a China closing, but Mongolia would not. I suspect this might have been the situation of the Mongols when the T'ang Dynasty ended.

T'ang was one of the few Chinese dynasties that not only allowed trade to enter from Central Asia but actually encouraged and protected it. The factionalization at the end of the T'ang Dynasty and the subsequent Sung Dynasty's focus on southern coastal trade to the neglect of the northern route may have had a differentially negative impact on Mongolia. I believe there was one abortive attempt by the Mongolians to take the Norther Kingdom prior to Ghenghis Khan ... perhaps Lord M. can confirm the details of some of the tribes involved. In any event, there is an approximate three hundred year period in which northern trade is ... probably not non-existent, but greatly diminished from what it had been at the height of the T'ang Dynasty.

After taking the Northern Kingdom, Khan sued for trade with the Moslem ruler who controlled the Central Asian part of the route but was repelled by him. Thereafter comes the conquest

What I find interesting about the money argument (and I agree with it) is that he knew where the money was. We're talking about a region some 1500 miles southwest of the southwest-most tip of Mongolia, across one or two mountain ranges (depending on how you get there), and not diddly mountains either but arms of the Himalayas.

Mongol spies must have scouted out all this land, but even so ... the planning, the cost, the organization of that campaign ... they had to have had reason to believe it would be worth it.

So it seems to me more efficient to hypothesize that there had been some tradition of trade with that region in earlier times, and the fact that it was primarily the Northern Kingdom that was in turmoil for those ~300 years and that the Moslems rebuffed Khan's initial approach suggests to me that the previous trade going in to Mongolia had been severely curtailed. I hypothesize further from this that part of Khan's expansionist ambitions had to do with regaining that access. Anyway, we know what the Mongols did after conquering the Silk Road. They reopened it. They were not indifferent to it.

There have only been a few Chinese Dynasties that have bothered to protect the Silk Road, so the fact the Mongols took the trouble to actively defend the route where it entered China stikes me as a significant feature of their rule and, by extension, possibly, their original motivation.

As far as I know we have no written records of Khan outlining his campaign in these terms, but when I see the same pattern repeated by different conquerors at other times then I start to suspect it is not coincidental.

So ... this is not an appeal for a massive overhauling of history but an appeal to grant perhaps a little more acumen than we usually do to some of the peoples we consider 'primitive.' Khan certainly knew where his bread was buttered, even if he didn't know what to do with a tablecloth.

I don't recall any evidence that the Khan or his immediate successors showed any interest in controlling the sea trade.

No, me neither. That portion of the route would not have been critical to the Mongol economy, neither from the Med nor the Baltic - at least, nowhere near as critical as the Central Asian portion of the route.

You can sort of tell where regional interests begin and end by where the wars are fought. Trade routes are actually a series of 'circles' connected by lines. When trade wars break out, it's usually the people on one circle trying to open the line to the next circle by conquering the next circle. Offhand, I can't think of any empire that has controlled more than two circles at a time. The Arabs almost managed it with their conquest of Spain, but they never controlled the whole of the Greek seaway, and they moved the Phoenicians seaway to the Sahara desert where they felt more comfortable navigating.

Jn

[Túrin Turambar]

Immediately following the unification the Mongols in 1206, they directly bordered with both the Western Xia (Xi Xia, or Tangut) Empire and the Jurchen Jin Empire (Northern China). Both of these were relatively wealthy and relatively weak (at the time) settled civilizations on the border of Mongolia – they were obvious targets.

When he attacked the Tanguts, was Genghis Khan after control of the trade routes? I don’t really think so. I think that he may have viewed it as being related to the unification of Mongolia – the Tanguts were originally a nomadic tribe who had been turned into a vassal state by the T’ang Dynasty. He was almost certainly also simply after conquest and plunder.

In the case of the Jurchens, it was more obvious. They were the traditional overlords of Mongolia, and had been playing the Mongol tribes off against each other as a strategy to keep them from attacking their lands. There was an obvious desire among the Mongols to knock the Jin down a run or two. This shows something of the tension I mentioned earlier – powerful Chinese Dynasties like the T’ang were able to bring the people of the steppe under their thumb. Powerful steppe peoples, like the Xiongu confederation, were able to launch extended, devastating raids into China. The Mongols were the newest and most powerful of these confederations, it was fairly natural that they would attack China regardless of the status of the Silk Road.

As to the conquest of Persia, Genghis Khan tried to establish a trading relationship with the Kwarazham Empire, but was knocked back. He attacked there to teach the Persians a lesson, in addition to the desire for plunder and conquest.

Genghis Khan certainly showed acumen in controlling the trade routes he did capture, but it is unlikely that gaining access to them ranked highly on his list of priorities.

[Jnyusa]

]Genghis Khan tried to establish a trading relationship with the Kwarazham Empire

These are the guys I'm talking about. They ruled over the central portion of the Silk Road, which was a circle of cities centered in what is today Uzbek and Afghanistan. They controlled the flow of goods into China and India. Farqana, Samarkand, Bukhara, Merv, Balkh, and then as you moved into Persia, Herat, or into India, Kabul. At that time I believe they controlled part of India. They were also self-sufficient agriculturally, which is what enables them to weather the vagaries of trade with China and India, unlike the guys who 'walked the line' across the mountains and depended on this trade completely for their livelihood.

The next self-sufficient 'circle' to the West is the Levant. To the East it's the cities of Xingziang that form a sort of elongated semi-circle over the northern end of the Taklamakan.

The Kwarazhams were not next door to Mongolia but Khan knew all about their empire and I would suggest that he gained that awareness from the traders of Xingziang. The lesson he wanted to teach them was that they have to trade with Mongolia.

There might have been a number of perceptual issues involved here. The Moslems of Central Asia would not have been indifferent to trade with Xingziang. They had crossed the Tien Shan during the conquest and gone as far northeast as Turfan. Xingziang in the time of Khan was a mixture of Buddhism and Islam (and remains so today). Xingziang undoubtedly had routes that took their traders up into Mongolia but the Moslem armies did not get that far and it's not clear what Mongolia would have had to offer them that they couldn't get closer to home. The 'nomadic' trading good was primarily livestock and leather.

What Khan had in mind, it seems, is that they open a northern route from Central Asia over the Altai into Mongolia. This was not the conventional way to go. Central Asia looked east and west, not north. There are no population centers to the north, no caravanserai, and we're talking about a route that would have stretched about 2000 miles. Trade demands, you know, infrastructure, and there wasn't any in that direction. Also, the farther north you go the more the weather becomes an issue - the number of months that a route can actually be kept open.

The Shah's indifference to Khan's overtures might have been ... the way we would view an overture by the Kuna Indians or something that we change all our trade relationships with Central America. We would assess their military capability if we thought they had any but scoff at their suggestion. It just wouldn't fit with our thinking. Possibly it did not fit with the Shah's capability either. There's a cost-benefit issue from the traders' point of view, though they wouldn't have spoken about it quite like that in the 13th ce. And they probably viewed Khan as an illiterate nomad having no sense about these things; not a neighbor with whom one builds serious relations.

I don't know to what extent the Mongols may have tried to open trade routes in the north while they controlled China. My guess is - not much. They established a big garrison city in Xingziang which suggests to me that focus shifted to defending the traditional route.

Jn