Rich and Strange Aeons

Posted by WSCFriedman

https://asourdays.substack.com/p/the-steppe-is-not-remotely-neutral

This blog talks a lot about the world of the past, mostly describing the agrarian, settled societies that existed in Europe and the Middle East and China and the parts of India with really big rivers. These are the people who write long books we can read to find out what happened there without needing to spend too much time digging up tombs and guessing what the contents mean.

There’s some other people out there, though. One particular group of them writes very few books, but keeps intruding on the Europeans, Iraqis, Persians, Chinese and Indians in highly memorable ways! These result in stories that were about something else being about these foreigners, fire, devastation, death1, and how the great cities of Baghdad, Kaifeng and Gurganj became excellent targets for archeological work.

I am talking about the Huns, Magyars, Mongols, Avars, Turks, Xiongnu, Xianbei and all the other peoples of the Great Eurasian Steppe. There are many other non-agrarian, non-settled societies out there; many of them are peaceful herders or hunter-gatherers who live in the deep jungle and bother nobody, but they make the history books a lot less dramatically than the Mongols do.

Who are they? They are2 the people of the Great Eurasian Steppe, who ride their horses and drive their cattle and sheep and goats across the endless grassland that stretches from Ukraine to China. The steppe nomads are one of the most territorially defined peoples out there; they can exist anywhere the terrain is to be found, but if they leave the grasslands to settle somewhere else quickly find themselves losing the ability to function as they did at home.3 The steppe isn’t ideal farming territory - you can, in some parts, but particularly if you don’t have modern fertilizers it’s a real pain. Instead it’s optimal for herds of animals and the humans who drive them, moving them from one patch of grazing ground to the next instead of staying on one place for too long, sleeping in tents or wagons instead of stone buildings. It’s not a very rich life, or one that permits a very high population density, but it’s a life.

The horse is the animal that makes the steppe strategy work, because it’s what makes them absolutely terrifying. It’s a prestige animal almost as much as a practical one; cattle, goats, sheep and in places yaks, llamas or camels are more resource-efficient, but the horse is the personnel carrier of the premodern world - if you want to get anywhere fast it’s your best bet. The nomads spend most of their time on horseback, riding before they can walk, breeding their horses for endurance more than strength or speed. When they hunt or travel, they usually do it on horseback. And when they shoot, they do it on horseback.4

Mount and Blade players among you will nod when I tell you that shooting a bow from horseback is hard, but even they are underestimating how hard. If you combine the difficulty of shooting a bow while bouncing on a trampoline with the difficulty of shooting a bow while on a motorcycle driving down the highway at 20 MPH, you will be leaving out the difficulty of the fact that you’re supposed to be managing the horse (with just your legs and feet, obviously, you need your arms for the bow) as you do it. The ideal horse archer charges head-on at the enemy, firing off his arrows and then wheels around (continuing to empty his quiver as he does) before the enemy’s cavalry rushes out to catch him. If you want to do this as your primary strategy in war, you need to accept one of two possibilities: Either you will train intensely as a professional and still be pretty bad at it, or you need to spend your entire life on horseback, hunting and shooting for food and honor, and that will get you qualified to do it right.

The professional armored horse archers of China and Byzantium go with the first option. The nomads of the steppe get the second free as a byproduct of their normal lives, and in war they are almost invincible. An all-mounted army can move much faster than an all-infantry or combined arms force, outrunning any superior force and isolating and destroying any inferior force. Campaign reports of generals trying to fight them report the constant harassment; scouts that don’t come back, supply lines cut, daring raids on the camps at night, constant harassments that leave them worried and exhausted - and then the nomads finish gathering their forces, and suddenly the army that was supposed to smash the steppe horde5 isn’t there any more.

Mostly, the nomads spend their time living their normal lives, lives which they don’t write down and so we don’t know all that much about. We know they hunted and herded and traded, we know they fell in love and quarreled and had we know they were usually more egalitarian than the settled peoples. The tribes have nobles and kings, but the difference between the the tiers are smaller and there’s more social mobility for able men and women.6 This involves raiding settled neighbors (or being paid not to, or both), but a lot more ordinary driving their herds around with the only targets for war being game animals. The Huns are famed as a warlike people, sure, but so are the Goths, Alemanni, Picts, Parthians and Romans.

But every once in a while, you get the Steppe Snowball.7 A great military leader will promise his people victory in war against their neighboring tribe, win, bring the neighboring tribe under his banner, promise the two combined tribes victory against their neighbor, win, keep going and this steadily-building confederation will charge across the steppe in a random direction, sweeping all the peoples of the steppe into a single gigantic wrecking ball that ultimately collides with at least one of China, Persia, India or Europe.

Under mundane conditions, the steppe nomads are too outnumbered to defeat the Romans or Chinese in war8, because herding gets you a much lower population density than farming. When the Steppe Snowball starts rolling, though, we see what happens when the numbers are in their favor, where the . Then their great conquering leader dies, he probably doesn’t have a competent heir9, and the confederation collapses. If they conquered one of their target locations, their dynasty lasts maybe a hundred years10 maybe more, before going native (in its fighting ability) while offending the natives (in its methods of governance) and as a result collapsing.11 In the fallen empire’s wake, new empires form in the steppes, pasturing their herds on the now-empty land the Snowball swept over.

And this is why I keep saying “except the steppe.” Any questions?

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https://asourdays.substack.com/p/the-steppe-is-not-remotely-neutral