Genghis Khan on Tax Policy: Oh, I Never Thought of That

Truth is, Genghis Khan didn't know the first thing about tax policy. The first thing being: don't kill the goose that lays the golden egg:

At the time of Jenghis Khan's last campaign in Kansu, a Mongol general pointed out to him tht his new Chinese subjects would be useless to him, since they were unsuited to warfare, and that therefore he would do better to exterminate them--there were nearly ten million--so that he might at least make use of the soil as grazing land for the cavalry. Jenghiz Khan appreciated the cogency of this advice, but Ye-lü Ch'u-ts'ai protested. "He explained to the Mongols, to whom any such idea was unknown, the advantage to be gained from fertile soil and hard-working subjects. He made clear that by imposing taxes on land and exacting tribute on merchandise, they might colect 500,000 ounces of silver yearly, 80,000 pieces of silk, and 400,000 sacks of grain." He won his point, and Jenghiz Khan ordered Ye-lü Ch'u-ts'ai to draw up a system of taxation on these lines.

--René Grousset, The Empire of the Steppes:

A History of Central Asia 251(English Trans. 1970)

Afterthought: Might be more correct to say that Genghis Khan understood tax policy well enough (or parasitology: don't kill the host); he just didn't understand settled peoples. By all accounts, Genghis Khan set foot in a city just once in his life (Bukhara, around 1221), and he didn't like it, and didn't stay--one is reminded of the Saudis coming to meet with Presidennt Roosevelt, and pitching their tents on shipboard.

Religion versus Barbarism

It is said that one of the functional virtues of religion is that it helps to lift us out of barbarism. I grant that sometimes it does. But it's a mixed bag Here, René Grousset compares the devastations inflicted by Tamberline in the 15th Century with those of his predecessor Genghis (Jenghiz?) Khan in the 13th.

It has been noted that the Jenghiz-Khanite Mongol invasion of the thirteenth century was less cruel for the Mongols were mere barbarians who killed simply because for centuries this had been the instinctive behavior of nomad herdsmen toward sedentary farmers. To this ferocity Tamerlane added a taste for religious murder. He killed for piety. He represents a synthesis, probably unprecedented in history, of Mongol barbarity and Muslim fanaticism and symbolizes that advanced form of primitive slaughter which is murder committed for the sake of an abstract ideology, as a duty and a sacred mission.

--René Grousset, The Empire of the Steppes:
A History of Central Asia 434 (Trans. 1970)

Earlier, Grousset has argued that Mongol warfare, however savage, was more "natural," in that it was a matter of nomadic warriors preying on their richer settled brethren, using techniques they had developed in the hunting of (other?) animals.

Genghis Khan's Supreme Joy

To live in a house by the side of the road, and be a friend to man.

No, wait, wrong bin. Genghis Khan's Supreme Joy, Take Two:

To cut my enemies to pieces, drive them before me, seize their possessions, witness the tears of those dear to them, and embrace their wives and daughters.

There, that's more like it. And to think I would have settled for "to outlive your enemies."

Source: René Grousset, The Empire of the Steppes: a History of Central Asia (Trans. 1970) at 249, quoting Rashid ad-Din, Persian/Jewish polymath and historian.

Afterthought: But GK understood that the good times would end:

After us, the people of our race will wear garments of gold; they will eat sweet, greasy food, ride splendid coursers, and hold in their arms the loveliest of women, and they will forget that they owe these things to us. ...

Id.

The Soviet Yurt

It's a pre-1991 story but it's still cute. The subject is the yurt, the felt-lined, circular mobile home that has served as housing on the steppes since the dawn of time. It's a marvelous invention, really: cool in the summer, snug and warm in the winter, making life bearable in a climate of extremes.

Anyway, here's a Soviet newspaper announcing another triumph for Soviet science--the Soviet yurt. Built out of aluminum it is--uh, well, a sauna in the summer, an icebox in the winter. Um, let's take another look at the mission statement

Syncretism in Samarkand

--You are Tatar?
--Yes, Tatar. From Kazan.
--Muslim?
She waved a hand.
--Once, twice a year.
--And your husband is Russian?
--Russian, yes.
--Orthodox?
She waved a hand again.
--We color Easter Eggs.

A Central Asia Reading List

Here's a catalog, quirky and personal, of stuff I read in preparation for Central Asia--some not about Central Asia at all.

• Abazov, Rafis, Palgrave Concise Historical Atlas of Central Asia (2008). I love Atlases. Fun to have around. See earlier comment here

• Anthony, David W., The Horse, The Wheel, and Language: How Bronze-Age Riders from the Eurasian Steppes Shaped the Modern World (2007). Summarizes a lot of data. See earlier comment here. Be interesting to see a professional critique.

• Armstrong, Karen, The Great Transformation (2007). Chapter 1 has a provocative account of Zoroastrianism as the response of a settled people against cattle-rustling. Discussions of the early Aryans and the Vedic scriptures may also be relevant to Centraal Asia.
  

• Arnold, Matthew, Sohrab and Rustum (Gutenberg Files). An ancient epic tale of Central Asia, retold by a 19th-Century Victorian who, to the best of my knowledge, never set foot in the place, and I pity poor Henry Pilote, the English teacher at Manchester High School West who had to harry me through it back in 1953. Oh, and there is this.
  

• Barfield, Thomas, The Perilous Frontier (1992). More about China than Central Asia, but instructive on how steppe warriors operate. Earlier comments here.

• Findley, Carter Vaughn, The Turks in World History (2005). "Professorial" (ahem!), but instructive overview of Turkish culture. Snippets here.

• Grousset, René, The Empire of the Steppes: A History of Central Asia (English Trans. 1970). A classic, unfortunately. Slow going, a welter of detail But worth the effort. Chapters on Genghis Khan and Tamerlane especially good.

• Herodotus, Histories, Book IV 1-144 (many editions) classic account of "the Scythians," practitioners of "the Scythian defense"--first reported account of nomad warfare.
  

• Hildinger, Erik, Warriors of the Steppe (2001). Reviewed here. Remarkably helpful account of steppe warfare; great lessons on the importance of tactics and "choosing their own war."

• Hopkirk, Peter, The Great Game: The Struggle for Empire in Central Asia (1992). Canonical text on the 19th-Century clash of empires.

• Hopkirk, Peter, Setting the East Ablaze: Lenin's Dream of an Empire in Asia (1996). Less extensive than Great Game, but in some ways more interesting.

• Kemal, Yashar, Memed, My Hawk (NYRB 2005). Not Central Asia, but a memorable window into traditional Turkic society. Reviewed here.

• LeVine, Steve, The Oil and the Glory: The Pursuit of Empire and Fortune on the Caspian Sea (2007). Boy's own adventure tale of the scramble for oil in the post-Soviet years, fun to read but made largely irrelevant by the new assertion of Soviet power. A snippet here.
  

• Lewis, Geoffrey, ed. The Book of Dede Korkut (1976). Bardic recitations from the Oghuz Turks, exact origins lost in the mists of time. Forceful and dramatic, but so full of paranoia and betrayal they get depressing after a while (my friend Judy asks: have you tried reading the Old Testament?).

• Marozzi, Justin, Tamerlane: Sword of Islam, Conqueror of the World (2004). A warning, not a recommendation. Save your money. Amateurish and haphazard. Read the Tamerlane chapter of Grousset, supra, instead. A brief excerpt from Marozzi is here.

• Platonov, Soul (NYRB 2007). The title story is a hair-raising account of life in a dying desert society on the edge of the modern (Soviet) world. Said to be even better in Russian. Other comments here.

• Olcutt, Martha Brill, Central Asia's Second Chance (2005). Good "first book" on current issues. See earlier comments here.

• Polo, Marco, Travels, many editions. Less on Central Asia than you might expect, but always good fun. See excerpts here.

• Whitfield, Susan, Life Along the Silk Road (2001). Earlier comments here.

Optional Extra: I hate to admit it, but this tune was running through my mind the whole trip.

The Biggest Fathead of the Second Millennium AD

Many have said that Genghis Khan may be the most important political/military leader of the last millennium. I wonder if we have paid enough attention to the issue of the greatest fathead. I don't mean “monster,” in the sense of Hitler or Mao or Pol Pot. I mean someone more on the order of of, oh, say Ala al-Din Muhammed, aka Muhammed of Khwarizm, who (per René Grousset) “brought the Khwaraizmian empire to its peak ... during his reign it became the dominant state in Central Asia.”

Ah yes, Khwarizm—here it is, the area around Khiva and—well, pretty much the territory in Uzbekistan where I was traveling last week. Muhammed succeeded his father about 1210. Over the next seven years, more or less, he pasted together an empire of sorts that extended out into Afghanistan and Persia. It was impressive on the map, although on close scrutiny, it appears to have been pretty fragile. Muhammed also seems to have had a knack for irritating near neighbors who might otherwise have become his allies.

At this point, Muhammed may never even have heard of his great contemporary, Genghis Khan, for it is a remarkable fact that Genghis, as a world leader, got late start. He didn't really consolidate among the Mongols until he was around 40, i.e., around 1207. He spent the next several years embroiled with the Chinese. It was only after that that he turned his attention to the west and found himself face to face with Muhammed.

Genghis' first approach seems to have been benign. He came looking for trade. But in 1218, a Khwazmarian governor robbed a Mongol caravan and put 100 of its members to death. Genghis was not amused. He demanded compensation and, being refused, made ready for war.* By the summer of 1219, Mongol forces began popping up all over Central Asia. In February of 1220, Genghis himself destroyed Bukhara. He moved on to loot Samarkand, reducing its population by about three quarters. In April of 1221, the Mongols finally took the old Khwarizm capital of Gurganj, modern Urgench: they drowned it by rerouting a river.

The rest, as they say, is history. The Mongols on into India and Iran. Genghis himself lived only until 1227—by a narrow reading, his entire career on the world stage lasted not much longer than seven years. But his sons and grandsons dominated China, Persia, Central Asia and the hinterland of “Russia” for generations to come.

*I'll say. "[T]he whirlwind of anger cast dust into the eyes of patience and clemency while the fire of wrath flared up with such a flame that it drove the water from his eyes and could be quenched only by the shedding of blood."--The Persian chronicler Ata-Malik Juvaini, quoted in Jack Weatherford, Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World at 107 (2004).

I Was Sitting in this Medrassah ...

I was leaning next to the beer cooler in an old medrassah,watching a fashion show...

There now, is that not a good lede? But it's true—Well, okay, I wasn't actually leaning against the cooler; just sitting next to it, with my head tilted to one side. And I didn't actually drink the beer, but blame that on my sour tummy. And by "old," I mean "decomissioned," in the same sense that the "old" Episcopal Church is now a Chinese restaurant. Anyway, the point is that here in Uzbekistan (specifically, Bukhara, one of the jewels in the Islamic crown), they wear their faith with a kind of relaxed ease that we don't know much about in the more general world. And it isn't just Bukhara: back in Samarkand, I joined a crowd doing some cheerful group dancing in another former holy place: my friend Max called it “Fiddler in the Mosque.”

It's not that they're not Muslim; by all accounts, the vast majority of Central Asians identify themselves as Muslim (except the Russians, who identify as Orthodox). But I said they were easygoing, and everything I saw about the practice of the faith is enough to ratify the point. From what I gather it has long been that way—one reason, perhaps, why the faith was able to survive 75 years of Soviet secularism. At any rate, it is what you feel there now.

It is, if nothing else, a useful reminder (a) that Islam is various and (b) it is our (everybody's?) bad luck that the oil money all fell on the Wahabis and their close kin, aka the most intolerant and dangerous among them, putting the screamers in the best position to grab the microphone (or the grenade) and to finance newer, more toxic medrassahs in number of places, not excluding central Asia.

More pessimistic observers will say I'm deluding myself: that radical Islam is in truth a cancer on the Central Asian body politic, and growing fast. I've no doubt that they could make a case for their view: the extremist variety does indeed seem to be driving the Islamic engine almost everywhere (and in repressive countries like these, it is bound to be the extremists who drive the engine of dissent). My point is that from walking the streets and such, you'd never guess it. Moreover, if you were a corrupt autocrat in a little-known distant country, if you did have political difficulties, whom would you try to blame? While I was in Bukhara, I read about how police were clashing with “Islamic extremists” in Ashghabat, scheduled as a later stop. Maybe so, but you get to Ashghabat and you quickly perceive that the “government” in power here is surely the most autocratic of a bad lot. If you're the autocrat, you are not going to tell the Western press that you are beating the heads of ordinary people who just want to get about their business: the extremist card is the one you are bound to play. By the way, did I mention that Turkmenistan has a thriving wine industry? On my sample, the stuff tastes like battery acid, but their heart seems to be in the right place.

One detects a vicious circle here: an autocratic government generates an angry and aggressive response, which triggers more head-besting, which triggers more anger and aggression. It is easy to predict a bad end here. Meanwhile, I think I'll head back to the medrassah and kick back with a brew.

Listening to Proust in Central Asia

It was Mrs. Buce's idea first. She bought the 39-disk set of Neville Jason reading excerpts (!) from Marcel Proust's Remembrance of Things Past (link); she loaded them on her Ipod. In an idle moment on the eve of my trip to Central Asia, I followed her example.

Flash forward to 3 o'clock on the morning of Saturday, September 13: I'm in a hotel room in Samarkand when I felt the first twinge of what became a Class-IV bout with Tamerlane's Tummy. I'll spare you the details, but I spent most of the next 36 hours either in bed or—well, mostly in bed. To keep me company, I fired up the Ipod and so, for the next day and a half, I drifted in and out of a troubled sleep to the stereophonic sonoroties of Jason's Proustian periods.

A complication was that I seemed to have the Ipod on shuffle, so whatever continuity there may be in the original seems to have been lost in delivery.

The odd—okay, the amazing—thing is that it worked, and indeed pretty well. I know that Proust is famously “complex,” but this is a characterization easily misunderstood. His sentences are coiled and serpentine; “great cathedrals,” I once heard someone say, “of commas and semicolons.” But he is not mischievously secretive like Joyce, or terminally opaque like Henry James. Once you uncoil, Proust makes his position is unmistakably clear—often poignant, sometimes savagely funny, and always penetrating or insightful. You can get it on the page, but in any event Jason gets it, and that's what makes these outtakes such good company in troubled times. Proust as a cure for a far-away gut ache, what a concept.

Central Asia: Executive Summary

Sunlight again, after a decent few hours' sleep, after 60-hour day, with an opportunity to begin to assess my two weeks (plus) in Central Asia.

“Did you see--?”--before you ask, probably no; the stuff I did not see, vastly exceeds what I did see. I touched base in only three of the five 'stans—Kazakh-, Uzbeki- and Turki- (an angry gut foreclosed an optional sidetrip to Tadzhiki-). I didn't see the flaming gas wells, the dying Aral Sea, the military bases (American and Russian), nor the prison where (it is said) they drown captives in boiling water for persisting in the recitation of the Koran. I was there to look at ancient ruins—so, the crimes of former bullies like Tamerlane, Genghis Khan and Alexander the Great, as distinct from the current lot. Aside from that, it is fun (and, I think, instructive) just to get the feel of a place--how far apart things are (not that far); how big the sky is (pretty big--if California has 12 suns, then this place has at least 14).

On its own narrow terms, I'd have to count the venture a success. Measured in terms of sheer plentitude, Central Asia is perhaps not as rich in ruins as some other places—the first generation of Muslims pretty much reduced the old stuff to rubble in the Seventh Century, and what the Muslims didn't get in the Seventh Century, the Mongols more or less did in during the 13^th. But there is still a lot of good stuff. You can see an ancient Parthian settlement at Nisa outside Ashgabat (just like the Romans, the Parthians had arches, who knew?). And there is a marvellous, moony landscape out in the middle of the Karakum desert at Merv. But most of what you see is later Islamic—not least, ironically, the stuff left behind by Tamerlane; ironic in that Tamerlane surely stands high on the list of all-time destructive bad guys (the clue is that Tamerlane saved most of his destructive instincts for export; for the homefolks, he favored monuments and costly palaces).

The Tamerlane stuff is interesting in its own right, but also because most of it has been aggressively (savagely?) restored, mostly by the Soviets. This isn't a complaint, precisely: everything is an artifact, and I would love to know more about just how and (even more) why they did it. I didn't have a lot of luck getting people to talk about this issue: “well, they weren't stupid people, you know” huffed one tour guide (trained by Intourist)--which is entirely correct, but beside the point. My take is on the whole they did a pretty good job, although there is a certain aridity to, e.g.,the Samarkand Registan. And Khiva, a smaller town with a bigger complex of monuments, comes perilously close as appearing to be some weird kind of Islamo-Soviet Colonial Williamsburg.

I should add that one real plus to the trip was the people, the Central Asians. Granted that I was in a tourist bubble, still I spent a fair amount of time doing what I like to do anywhere, I.e., walking the streets. I also spent a morning at the bazaar in Ashgebat which is absolutely not designed with tourists in mind, I can assure you. I have to say, they were almost without exception easygoing and affable—not overly impressed or irritated by my presence, mostly busy just doing life. At the other end of the line, Almaty could pass for prosperous, with new car dealerships in serried ranks on the road in from the airport. You could almost forget (but then, maybe I was looking in the wrong places) that they all live under some of the worlds most unpleasant governments, where former Soviet bureaucrats more or less deploy the populace as an extractive resource to line the pockets of themselves and their sons and their daughters.

Heading Home

Checking in from the Frankfort Airport, where they'll take American money for small bottles of water, at $5 each. More Central Asia postings in a couple of days, but I still don't know why they spell Samarqand with a q.

Silk Road: Khiva

I’m booked to spend one night in Khiva. Second prize, two nights in Khiva?

In 1840, near the height of the “great game” a British Lieutenant set out from Khiva with 416 Russians whose release from slavery he had effected in negotiation with the Khan. He marched them 500 miles to the Russian Fort Alexandrovsk on the Caspian Sea. The Russians, in the delicate politics of the time, were not amused:

She seemed to consider that the interposition of England in her behalf was almost an insult; that she was humiliated by accepting of any favour at our hands; and she thus refuses to the present day to admit tht she was indebted to Shakespeare’s intercession for the recovery of her kidnapped subjects. The extreme sensitiveness, indeed, which she has betrayed upon this subject can only be explained by her pretension to exclusive relations with the Uzbek principalities, both commercial and political; a pretension which of course has never been recognized in England, and which it may yete be of national importance to us distinctly to disavow.

--“The Russians in Central Asia,” London Quarterly Review CCXXXV,
Article VIII, 277-304 284 (July 1865).

Available here. To be fair, I guess you'd have to add that the British were not amused that the Russians were not amused.

Post-Visit Update: Actually, Khiva is a perfectly pleasant place. Bit touristy, but the slaves, if any, are kept decently under wraps.

Silk Road: Booked for Bukhara

I’m booked to be in Bukhara in Uzbekistan from now through Friday morning. It’s the home, inter alia, of Muhammad Ibn Ismail Ibn Ibrahim Ibn al-Mughirah Ibn Bardizbah al-Bukhari, but don’t even think of calling him “Al.” Now this:

Of the thousands of cities conquered by the Mongols, history only mentions one that Genghis Khan deigned to enter. Usually, when victory became assured, he withdrew with his court to a distant and more pleasant camp while his warriors completed their task. On a March day in 1220, the Year of the Dragon, the Mongol conqueror broke with his peculiar tradition by leading his cavalry into the center of the newly conquered city of Bukhara, one of the most important cities belonging to the sultan of Khwarizm in what is now Uzbekistan. Although neither the capital nor the major commercial city, Bukhara occupied an exalted emotional position throughout the Muslim world as Noble Bukhara, the center of religious piety known by the epithet “the ornament and delight of all Islam.” Knowing fully the propaganda value of his actions by conquering and entering the city, Genghis Khan rode triumphantly through the city gates, past the warren of wooden houses and vendors’ stalls, to the large cluster of stone and brick buildings at the center of the city.

—Jack Weatherford, Genghis Khan
and the Making of the Modern World 3 (2004)

Silk Road: Samarkand: These Guys Need a Union

I’m due to be at Samarkand from today through next Monday. Tamerlane built a great mosque here, in honor of his chief wife, or of her mother (account differ). Tamerlane got his first look at the mosque as it neared completion in 1404, on his arrival home from a five-year campaign. He wasn’t happy: the portal was too law, dwarfed by the portal of the madrassah across the street. Bad things happened to the chiefs of construction. Tamerlane himself now took charge of the project. The chronicler Ruy Gonzalez de Clavijo reports:

He would stay there the best part of the day during the work. He would arrange for much meat to be cooked and brought, and then he would order them to throw portions of the same down to the workmen in the foundations, as though one should cast bones to dogs, in a pit, and a wonder to all he with his own hands did this. Thus he urged on their labour; and at times would have coins thrown down to the masons when especially they worked to his satisfaction.

—Quoted in Justin Marozzi, Tamerlane 226-7(2004)

Off to Central Asia: Map

Travel plans for the month:


View Larger Map

“There's No Time to Waste Then, Is There?”

I’m off for Central Asia, to look at some of the cities along the Silk Road. I’ve done the Eastern (“Chinese”) portion, from Chang’an (Xi’an) across to Kashgar. It would be fun to plow straight on west over the mountains, but I think I’ll pass on that and instead just drop in by plane. Not knowing whether I will have—or want to use—internet access, I’ve put up a few “anticipatory location posts” to sketch out the framework as scheduled over the next several weeks. Meanwhile, for starters:

…the caravan had settled into the dull routine of desert travel: long, hot stages through a featureless landscape with an indifferent inn at the day’s end if they were lucky; problems with sick camels; cold desert nights; searing daytime heat; dust storms and floods that arouse without warning; and the continuing threat of bandits.

—Susan Whitfield, The Silk Road 44 (“The Merchant’s Tale”) (1999)

Or in the immortal words of Omar Sharif: “If the camels die, we die. And in twenty days they will start to die.” And as Peter O’Toole responded: “There's no time to waste, then, is there?”

Georgia in the Shadow of the KGB

I happened to be reading Steve LeVine's The Oil and the Glory this week, just as the Russia/Georgia war flared up. LeVine's subtitle is The Pursuit of Empire and the Fortune on the Caspian Sea. It's mostly about the last quarter of the 20th Century. It's mainly about the resources claimed by Kazakhstan and Azerbaijan, but there are passing references to Georgia, including a brief but pointed discussion of the efforts to put an oil pipeline there. LeVine offers some useful context on the long history of relations between Russia and Georgia. Georgia, he says,

occupied a special place in Russian imperial culture. It was the spectacular playland of the czarist and Soviet aristocracies, who cherished its gorgeous Black Sea beaches and sanatoria, its famous Borjomi water, and itds vineyards, the source of the wrold's first cultured grapes. Georgia was a feast, with exceedingly varied and artfully served vegetarian, lamb, and pork dishes; the country's drinking ritusals were weidely copied, reigned over by a toastmaster called a tamada. (219-20)

It was Edward Shevardnadze, a Georgian, who collaborated with Mikhail Gorbachev in the enteprise of unraveling the old Soviet Union. After the collapse, he returned to take up the presidency in his natal state, bringing with him a seemingly illitable amount of street cred with world leaders.

Per LeVine, the Georgians understood that they faced an urgent challenge: how to define themselves as independent against their much larger neighbor. LeVine credidts a Geoergian civil servant, one Gogi Tsomaya, with hitting upon the idea of an oil pipeline. Although Georgia itself has virtually no oil, its location positioned it uniquely well as a transmission ground. Such a project, Tsomaya is quoted as thinking, made "Georgia interesting to the West." And then LeVine offers this telling anecdote:

Shevardnadze sat in silence for a moment and then shouted, "Get out of here! Do you want the Russiasns to blow me up?" The men scurried back to [another] office, where the phone was ringing. It was Shevardnadze.

"You know what? You keep exploring the issue," said he Georgian leader. "Whenever I need it, we will have it."

His advisers were not certian whether Shevardnadze had actually lost his temper for a moment or was trying to confuse an eavesdropping KGB. (221-2)

Afterthought: Taken as a whole, LeVine's book is a first-class piece of reporting, but it suffers the curse of good journalism--timing. In retrospect, LeVine's Caspian oil race was a brief wrinkle in eternity, between the collapse of the Soviet Union and the new assertion of Russian power. No matter what the result of this week's fracas, it is unlikely that an ounce of oil (or natural gas) will move an inch in Central without a Russian say-so.

Appreciation: Hildinger on Steppe Warriors

You wouldn't want to call Erik Hildinger's Warriors of the Steppe exactly "scholarship." There are nol footnotes. The bibliography is extensive, but not exhaustive. And the tone is too easy and direct. But he's got a remarkable story to tell, which he presents with crisp conviction.

Executive summary: for something like 2200 years--until the implementation of gunpowder--nomads from Central Asia repeatedly made a nuisance of themselves with their more "civilized" neighbors and more than once, bid fair to put these neighbors permanently out of business. They succeeded in doing so for two reasons: one, they deployed a set of lethal tactics that their neighbors--unaccountably by any measure--persistently refused to learn. And two, they forced these neighbors to accept their (nomadic) definition of war.

Genghis Khan was their prime avatar--with his descendants, perhaps the most successful and effective military presence in history, certainly in the last thousand years (yes, counting Napoleon and Hitler). But there were many others: Scythians, Parthians Huns, Magyars, Bulgars, Avars, Seljuks, Crimean Tatars, even the Jurchids who imposed on the Chinese their last foreign dynasty.
There were failures: not every oppporunistic nomad became Genghis Khan. Sometimes, the invaders failed because the defenders used their own tactics against them (think Mamluks); sometimes because they fell into anarchy and lost their fighting edge (think Dmitri Donskoi). But it is impossible to name any other culture that so persistently and so consistently inflicted pain on its neighbors.

The complex of tactics is as simple as it was devastating. Ride light, durable, fast-moving horses. Take the opponents by surprise. Surround them and devastate them with a hail of arrows. Retreat--or appear to retreat, but wait until your pursuers have broken ranks and then turn and open fire. The surprise is not that it worked once, but that it worked time after time after time. And there was no mystery: the first account is in Herodotus, about 450 BC. One cannot escape the notion that arrogance and indifference and cultural blindness had at least as much to do with the nomads' success as any peculiar virtue in technique.

The matter of "choosing their own war" is perhaps more complicated, but at least as interesting. The key point is that the step nomads, at least traditionally, weren't interested in conquering cities. They were interested mainly in pillage, and cities were merely an incidental detail. So they had no interest in the war of position and domination so central to the strategic thinking of the West. Even Genghis Khan, who used siege engines (he learned about them from the Chinese), and who build a semi-durable network of polities---even Genghis Khan, so they say, was actually in a city only once in his life.

One invigorating lesson from Hildinger's narrative is that all war is stylized, conventional: even "total" war hasw its norms and its conventions, and a fabric of values from which the protagonists cannot easily escape. It's a lesson profitably to be learned by anybody who hazards combat with an enemy whose reading from a wholly different page.

I Do Love Maps!

I’ve got a chance to go out to Central Asia in September and I’m really looking forward to it: never been out there before, eager for a chance to piece together the middle of the Silk Road, and to have a look at the only city Genghis Khan is known ever to have entered (link), with maybe the odd peep at one of those oil pipelines that have us all so exercised at the moment.

At least I think that’s what it is about, but I’m pretty shaky at the moment. I know that Kazakhstan is that vast void of undifferentiated steppe-land, and I’ve heard of Türkmenbaşy, the (late) strongman of Turkmenistan, who renamed the month of January after himself. I think I can find Uzbekistan on a map. But other than that, I’m pretty shaky. Remind me again, which one is Kyrgystan, which one Tajikistan? And which one speaks a version of Persian? (that’s Tajikistan—ed.) (Thanks—Buce).\

But wait, there’s help—here’s Rafis Abazov, with the Palgrave Concise Historical Atlas of Central Asia (2008)! Maps! Forty-five of them! You’ve got your Sogdians, your Timurids, your Tokharistan (no kidding, really Tokharians?). And transport routes! And ethnic enclaves! And mineral deposits! Mmmm, bauxite! I do love maps!