The revise the paper of the Eurasian nomad history

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List of Maps ~

Introduction: Drawn by Dorothy de Fontaine

The Steppe Zone of Eurasia Endpapers 1 The Steppe ~nd History .~

1. First Thmst of the Hsiung-nu and Migration of the Yiieh-chih 22 2. Central Asia in the Han Dynasty 33

3. The First "Mongol" Empires: Juan-juan and Epthalite about 500 A.D. 77

4. The Empire of Attila 91

5. The Turkic T'u-chiieh Empire at the End of the Sixth Century and the Beginning of the Seventh 104-105

6. Empire of the Uigur Turks between 745 and 840 123 7. The Kin Kingdom about 1150 135

8. The Seljuk Sultanate about 1094 156

9. The Khwarizmian and Kara-Khitai Empires at the Begin­

ning of the Thirteenth Century 162-163 10. The Russian Steppe about the Tenth Century 183

11. The Mongol Empire between 1230 and 1255 278-279

12. The Mongol Empire of China under the House of Kublai

Khan 322

13. The Khanate of the Jagatai between 1230 and 1365 337

14. The Mongol Kingdom of Persia under the House of Hulagu 388 15. The Empire of Tamerlane 454-455

16. The Timurids (Fifteenth Century) 474 17. Distribution of the Golden Horde 476

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In their physical manifestation, the high plateaus of Asia bear witness to the most tremendous geological drama in the history of this planet. The upheaval and isolation of this huge continental mass were due to the converging assaults of two great chains of folded mountains formed in two different periods: the Hercynian folds of the Tien Shan and Altai ranges-the first of these being bordered by the Serindian mass and the second by the ancient Siberian plateau of Angaraland-and the Himalayan alpine folds, which in the Miocene period replaced the ancient "Mediterranean" Sea of Eurasia. The arc of the T'ien Shan and Altai to the north­ west, and the opposing curve of the Himalayas in the south, to­ gether encircle and isolate Turkestan and Mongolia, leaving them, as it were, suspended above the surrounding plains. Because of their altitude and their great distance from the sea, these regions experience a continental climate of great extremes, with excessive heat in summer and bitter cold in winter. At Urga (Ulan Bator), in Mongolia, the temperature varies from +38° to _42° Centi­ grade. With the exception of the Tibetan massif, the great altitude of which produces almost polar vegetation, and also of the semi­ circular ranges of the Altai and T'ien Shan, which, for similar reasons, have an alpine climate characteristically graded from the forests of the foothills to the sparse vegetation on the peaks, almost the whole of continental Asia is covered by a longitudinal belt of18. Upper Asia in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries 534-535 grassy steppes, dormant in winter and dried up in summer. The prairie steppes-fertile in their irrigated areas, but shriveling and turning into desert in the central wastes-run from Manchuria to the Crimea, from Urga in Outer Mongolia to the regions of Merv and Balkh, where the North Eurasian prairie steppe gives place to

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1 Introduction: The Steppe and History xxiii xxii Introduction: The Steppe and History trade and religion, the Greek art of Alexander's successors and

the dry, subtropical steppe, more Mediterranean in character, of Iran and Afghanistan.

To the north, the longitudinal belt of the Eurasian steppes merges with the boreal forest region of central Russia and Siberia, and with the northern fringe of Mongolia and Manchuria. In three areas in the middle of the belt, the steppe imperceptibly yields to the desert: the deserts of Kyzyl-Kum in Transoxiana and Kara­ Kum south of the Amu Darya; the desert of Taklamakan in the enclosed Tarim basin; and lastly the Gobi Desert, a vast area stretching from southwest to northeast, from the Lob Nor, where the Gobi joins the Taklamakan, to the Khingan Mountains on the borders of Manchuria. They are like cancerous patches devouring the grassy belt, on which they have been continually encroaching since protohistoric times. The situation of the Gobi Desert, lying as it does between northern Mongolia, the forests of Baikal, and the steppes of the Orkhon and Kerulen to the north and southern Mongolia and the steppes of Alashan, Ordos, Chahar, and Jehol to the south, is one of the enduring factors preventing the survival of Turko-Mongol empires, whether of the Hsiung-nu of antiquity or of the T'u-chiieh of the Middle Ages.

This rout of the steppe by the desert gave a particularly decisive turn to the history of the Tarim basin, in what is nOw Chinese Turkestan. Having escaped the nomadic life of the plains (though always threatened or dominated by the northern hordes), this area acquired the urban, commercial character of the oases of the caravan routes and, by the chain of these oases, formed a line of communication between the great sedentary civilizations of the West-those of the Mediterranean world, of Iran, and of India­ and that of the Far East, namely, China. A double trail was laid in a double curve north and south of the dying Tarim River: the northern route ran through Tunhwang, Hami, Turfan, Kara Shahr, Kucha, Kashgar, the Fergana basin, and Transoxiana; the south­ ern, by way of Tunhwang, Khotan, Yarkand, the Pamir valleys, and Bactria. This slender dual thread that crosses deserts and peaks by turns, frail as a winding, long-drawn-out line of ants moving cross-country, was strong enough nevertheless to ensure that our planet should consist of a single world and not of two separate ones, and to maintain a minimum degree of contact be­ tween the anthill of China and the Indo-European anthills. It was the Silk Road and the road of pilgrimage, along which traveled

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Buddhist missionaries from Afghanistan. By this route the Greco­ Roman merchants mentioned by Ptolemy struggled to obtain access to the bales of silk from "Serica," and Chinese generals of the second Han dynasty sought to establish communication with the Iranian world and the Roman Orient. The maintenance of this great route of world commerce was, from the Han to Kublai Khan, an age-long principle of Chinese policy.

North of this narrow trail of civilization, however, the steppes prOVided the nomads with a route of a very different order: a boundless route of numberless tracks, the route of barbarism. Nothing halted the thundering barbarian squadrons between the banks of the Orkhon or the Kerulen and Lake Balkhash; for, although toward the latter point the Altai Mountains and the northern spurs of the T'ien Shan ranges seem to meet, the gap is still wide at the Imil River in Tarbagatai, in the direction of Chuguchak, as also between the Yulduz, the Hi, and the Issyk Kul basin to the northwest, where the horsemen from Mongolia beheld the further boundless expanses of the Kirghiz and Russian steppes. The passes of Tarbagatai, Ala-Tau, and Muzart were con­ tinually crossed by hordes from the eastern steppe on their way to the steppes of the west. In the protohistoric period, the move­ ment must have been more often in the opposite direction; one gains the impression that nomads of Iranian-that is, Indo-Euro­ pean-stock, called Scythians and Sarmatians by Greek historians and identified as Saka by Iranian inscriptions, must have pene­ trated a long way to the northeast, to the region of Pazyryk and Minusinsk, while other Indo-Europeans populated the Tarim oases, from Kashgar to Kucha, Kara Shahr, and Turfan, perhaps even as far as Kansu. It is certain, however, that from the be­ ginning of the Christian era the :Bow was from east to west. It was no longer the Indo-European dialects that prevailed-"East Iranian," Kuchean, or Tokharian-in the oases of the future Chinese Turkestan; it was rather the Hsiung-nu who, under the name of Huns, came to establish a proto-Turkic empire in south­ ern Russia and in Hungary. (The Hungarian steppe is a contin­ uation of the Russian steppe, as the Russian steppe is of the Asian.) After the Huns came the Avars, a Mongol horde which had :Bed from Central Asia under pressure from the T'u-chiieh in the sixth century, and which was to dominate the same regions,

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Introduction: The Steppe and History

first RUSSIa later Hungary. In the seventh century came thedh_ Khazar Turks, in the eleventh the Petcheneg Turks, and in the twelfth the Cuman Turks, all following the same trail. Lastly, in the thirteenth century, the Mongols of Jenghiz Khan integrated the steppe, so to speak, and became the steppe incarnate, from Peking to Kiev.' ..

The interior history of the steppe is that of Turko-Mongol hor<les jostling one another for the best grazing grounds, and of' their endless migrations from pasture to pasture, driven mail)fy by the needs of their herds. In some instances these alternating movements took centuries to complete owing to the vast djstances involved, to which everything about these people-their physical build and their way of life-had become adapted. of these un­ ceasing wanderings between the Yellow River .a:~d Budapest, history, written by., men of sedentary nations,.has retained but little, and then only such events as affecte,cl themselves. They noted the onslaught of,the waves that broke at the foot of the Great Wall or of their 't~anubian fortrtti;es, Tatung or Silistra. But what do they tell of"{he inner.furbulence of the Turko­ Mongol peoples? In what max be t?"med the imperial district of Karabalgasun and Karakorum i~"~00fi-thern Mongolia, at the source of the Orkhon, we find all the,!l~ad clans which aimed at the domination of other horde,s: there ~ethe Hsiung-nu, of Turkic stock, before our own era; the Mo 01 Hsien-pi in the third century A.D.; the Juan-juan, also Mon 1, in the fifth century; T'u-chiieh Turks in the sixth; Uigur Turk 'n the eighth; Kirghiz in the ninth; the Khitqtl of Mongol stock in t e tenth; the Kerayit or Naiman, presumcYSly Turkic, in the twelfth; nd lastly, in the thirteenth century/the Mongols of Jenghiz Kh~~etalthough we may be able,a identify these alternately TurkiC, nd Mongol clans which imJlosed their hegemony on others, we d ot know how the greayparent groups, Turkic, Mongol, and Tung~ were originally dj§tributed. No doubt at the present time the 'ft1i.WUS occupy not' only northern Manchuria but a great part of eastern Siberia, ;;, well as the east bank of the middle Yenisei in central Siberia; while the Mongols are grouped in historic Mongolia and the Tufks in western Siberia and the two Turkestans. It should be remtFbered, however, that in this latter region the Turks are late­ comers and that their influence in the Altai may not have made

.. Notes will be found in a group, beginning on p. 543.

/J Introdt;tction: The Steppe and History xxv 1 ~ itself felt until the first century of our era, in Kashgaria certainly

not before the ninth century, and in Transoxiana not before the1 f eleventh. The urban population both in Samarkand and Kashgar ,t remains fundamentally of Turkicized Iranian stock. Nevertheless,

I t history tells that in Mongolia itself the Jenghiz-Khanites Mongol­

ized many apparently Turkic tribes: the Naiman of the Altai, the Kerayit of the Gobi, and the Ongiit of Chahar. Before the unifica­ tion under Jenghiz Khan which brought all these tribes under the banner of the Blue Mongols, part of present-day Mongolia was Turkic; indeed, even now a Turkic people, the Yakut, occupy northeastern Siberia, north of the Tungus, in the Lena, Indigirka,

f and Kolyma basins. The presence of this Turkic group so near I

I Bering Strait, north of the. Mongols and even of the Tungus on the Arctic Ocean, necessitates caution in attempts to determine the relative positions of the "li,rst" Turks, Mongols, and Tungus. 2

What it does indicate is that th~\Turko-Mongoland Tungus mass must originally have been establi~J:1ed fairly far to the northeast; for not only present-day Ka~hgaria:\but also the northern slopes of the Sayan Mountains (Minusinsk )\~nd the Great Altai (Pazy­ ryk) were at that time peopled byl~do-Europeans from the "common Indo-European" cradle of south,ern Russia. Such a hy­ pothesis is consistent with the views of s~'ch linguists as Pelliot and Guillaume de H~h~sy, who, until furth~ evidence is forth­ coming, refuse to entertain any original conne!i'on between the Altaic languages (Turkic, Mongol, and Tungus) nd those of the Finno-Ugrian group, centered in the Urals. 3 More ver, the fairly wide divergence existing today, despite their ori . al kinship, between Turkic, Mongol, and Tungus leads us to thi that the three groups which during the historic period were unit d under common rule (hence frequent reciprocal borrowings of t s of civilization,) may for a time have existed at some distance rom each other, across the vastness of the Asian northeast!

Were the history of the Turko-Mongol hordes confined to their expeditions and obscure skirmishes in the search for new pasture~\ it would amount to very little, at least as far as present interest is concerned. The paramount fact in human history is the pressure exerted by these nomads on the civilized empires of the south, a pressure constantly repeated until conquest was achieved. The descent of the nomads amounted almost to a physical law, dic­ tated by the conditions prevailing in their native steppes.