Empires come about through conquest and colonisation. Historians who take a longer view see this as a part of how civilisations rise and fall.
Last year we saw international history professor Marc David Baer’s 500-plus-page The Ottomans. Now it’s the turn of the nomadic tribes of central Asia to have their contribution recognised. These two accounts intersect, as the conquerors of the steppes often butted up against the eastern-most borders of the Roman and Ottoman empires.
Kenneth Harl, an emeritus professor based in New Orleans, spent 25 years studying Greco-Roman sites in Turkey. Ten years ago, he launched a series of lectures called Barbarians of the Steppes. Interest in the Silk Road countries, a subject covered by the British Peter Frankopan, another distinguished professor of history, had spiked because of China’s Belt and Road infrastructure initiative. Harl was persuaded to turn his lectures into another doorstopper of 570 pages, including an index, extensive source notes and a glossary.
It covers 45 centuries of the nomads who, between 3500BCE and 2600BCE, domesticated the horse, invented wheeled transport and used their archery power to control the Euro-Asian grasslands over some 7.8 million square kilometres and a distance of 10,000km.
By 1900BCE, the Hittites had moved westward as far as Anatolia, now Turkey, followed by the Scythians, who dominated the steppes during the rise of the classical Greek and Roman empires. Alexander the Great ended the expansion of the Scythians in 329BCE, but the favour was returned when the Huns fought their way to Rome in the 5th century.
Their leader, Attila, was the first of three great conquering emperors whose exploits fill Harl’s dense narrative. Attila died in 452CE from over-indulgence at a marriage feast with Rome in his sights.
It took another eight centuries before the next great warrior, Genghis Khan, arrived at Europe’s doorstep, in the 13th century. Harl describes him as the world’s most important figure of that century. From his power base in today’s Mongolia, Genghis Khan united China for the first time in 400 years and took his horsemen all the way to Baghdad and Damascus, sacking these centres of Islamic learning, as well as conquering modern-day Moscow in northern Europe.
These Mongols were highly adaptive, both culturally and linguistically, but were ruthless in wielding their superior weaponry to suppress any resistance. Their next great leader was Kublai Khan, grandson of Genghis. His focus was expanding the Mongol empire eastward from China to Korea and Japan, which proved a stretch too far, overindulgence again sapping his health.
Visits by Western missionaries and traders such as Marco Polo were welcomed for their economic and intellectual impact. The Mongols did not enforce any religious belief. Rather, they showed curiosity about Christianity’s curative powers, as well as tolerating Buddhism and Islam.
It was the last that fuelled the final great nomadic conqueror, Timur, later known as Tamerlane, from his base at Samarkand in today’s Uzbekistan. His tyrannical sadism was admired in western Europe, as the victims were the common enemy, the Ottomans.
Where Attila had destroyed the Holy Roman Empire in favour of the Germanic tribes, Tamerlane undermined the Mongols’ power. His death in 1405 left no enduring institutions, allowing an Ottoman revival.
The nomads excelled in mapmaking, mathematics, astronomy, papermaking and block printing, which the European empires absorbed and exploited, while gunpowder was turned to deadly effect in weapons such as cannons and firearms that ended the era of armed horsemen.
