Yet ultimately the besetting inability of horse peoples to translate initial conquest into permanent power overtook the Mongols as it had overtaken the Huns and the Buminid Turks. Genghis is credited with great administrative ability but it was extractive, not stabilising, designed to support the nomad way of life, not to change it. His system included no means for legitimising the rule of a single successor, even in the eyes of the Mongols themselves, let alone that of their subjects. Nomadic custom was for the ruler’s appanage — territory, followers, flocks — to be divided equally between his sons and, when Genghis died in 1227, that is what happened. His empire was shared out between the four sons of his chief wife, Börte. The youngest, according to custom, received the ancestral lands, while the conquered territories were shared between the others. Over the next generations the Mongol rulers of Russia went their own way but those of Central Asia and China were drawn into disputes over the succession that resulted in civil war among Genghis’s grandsons. It was resolved when Hülegü, ruler of Central Asia, agreed to support the claim of his brother Kubilai (Kubla Khan) to the title Genghis had held. That did not, however, restore unity in the Mongol heartland. Kubla Khan was already engaged in the war that would establish his branch as the Yuan dynasty of China, a struggle that eventually consumed all his energies and progressively detached the Mongols who followed him from their old steppe life. Hülegü, meanwhile, in pursuing the challenge for primacy in Central Asia, increasingly involved himself in the endemic warfare on the eastern border of the Islamic lands and so committed himself to an eventual campaign against the caliphate itself.
Though the Mongol empire’s disintegration can be seen with hindsight to have begun from the moment when Kubla Khan turned to China, its disintegration was not apparent at the time either to Islam or to the Christian West; both correctly identified the Mongols as a power still greatly to be reckoned with, yet from entirely opposed perspectives. Locked in their own struggle, a century and a half old, for possession of the Holy Land, news of the approach of Hülegü’s Mongol horde from Central Asia brought, respectively, fear and hope.
Hope was what the Crusaders of the Latin kingdoms of the East felt. The Crusades have been described as constituting no more than ‘a border problem’ for Islam, one among many, and it is true that the Crusaders had never succeeded in enlarging the foothold they had won at Jerusalem in 1099 to any extent. They had even lost Jerusalem to Saladin in the twelfth century, clinging on by their fingernails to a few enclaves along the Syrian coast in the aftermath of his counter-offensive. Yet the appeal of the Crusade had never died in the West. Constantly renewed, it had called forth five ‘official’ Crusades by the thirteenth century; numerous others had been aborted or else directed against enemies of the Church in other lands. It had led to the founding of powerful military orders of knights under religious vows, to the building of a system of strong castles for them to garrison on the Crusading kingdoms’ borders and to the dissemination and refinement of a code of ‘chivalry’ among the horse-riding knightly class throughout Christian Europe. Between the eleventh and the thirteenth centuries chivalry had become unquestionably the most important element in the military culture of the West, at a time when the energies of the Western aristocracies were almost wholly directed to warmaking. The regular renewals of the call to go Crusading, to which kings lent as ready an ear as landless knights hoping to win fame and wealth in the East, therefore paid off. By the middle of the thirteenth century, when Hülegü’s Mongols stood poised to break out of Central Asia, Jerusalem had been recaptured and the integrity of the Latin kingdoms restored. Their fortunes seemed to have been revived and the original Crusading vision to stand in the ascendant again. Crusading hopes had been dashed so often, however, that no Crusader would confuse a temporary alleviation of difficulty with a permanent reversal of the balance of power. Power still rested with Islam, which had an apparently inexhaustible capacity to mobilise new offensive efforts from within its own spiritual and physical resources. In a one-front war, it enjoyed the advantages. Rumours of the approach of Hülegü’s Mongol horde from Central Asia, promising the opening of a second front against the Crusaders’ enemy, inevitably kindled expectations of a change of circumstances. To such effect, indeed, that the Crusaders leapt at a confusion of names of the mysterious horse peoples to invent a Christian king, Prester John, who was riding to their rescue from the interior of the steppe.85 Hülegü was not Prester John. The Crusaders were right, nevertheless, to perceive him as a threat to their enemies. Islam, which had felt a tremor of fear at news of his approach, was equally right to regard the Mongol advance as a menace. How greatly they were to be feared it had yet to learn.
Saladin’s success against the Crusaders in the twelfth century had shifted the effective centre of Islamic life to Egypt and Syria, where his descendants ruled as the Ayyubid dynasty. The legitimate Abbasid caliphate still had its seat at Baghdad, however, and it was that city that lay in the Mongols’ immediate path. At the outset, Hülegü’s approach in 1256 did not arouse alarm, since it seemed to be directed against the murderous sect of the Assassins; his destruction of their strongholds was widely welcomed and prompted the Christian Armenians to send a contingent to join his horde. In 1257, however, he entered Persia, which he quickly conquered, and by the end of the year stood poised to enter Mesopotamia. The Abbasid caliph, al-Muzt’asim, quaked before his coming but could not quite bring himself to submit to the unvarying Mongol demand: capitulation or extinction. In January 1258, Hülegü crossed the Tigris from Persia, brushed aside the Caliph’s army and captured Baghdad. Al-Muzt’asim was put to death by strangulation, a steppe practice that the Ottoman Turks would later institute as a succession procedure in their court life at Istanbul.86 Hülegü also had many of the Baghdad citizens massacred, though they had been guaranteed their lives, a breach with Mongol custom perhaps intended to transmit a shock wave ahead of him. The inhabitants of Aleppo in Syria, to which he next moved, were massacred also, but they had defended their city. The citizens of Damascus and many other Muslim places were more prudent and were spared. The spectacle of the collapse of Islamic power all about them encouraged the Crusaders to persist in their view that the Mongols aided their cause and even persuaded Bohemond, mightiest of Crusaders, to join their army for a while. When it pressed on into the Holy Land, however, they thought better and withdrew into their coastal forts. In the absence of Hülegü, who had been recalled to the steppe to take part in the selection of a Great Khan, they came to a hasty understanding with the equally anxious Ayyubids of Egypt and agreed, despite their bitter memories of defeat by Saladin, to allow an Egyptian army to enter their territory, make camp near Acre and prepare to oppose the Mongols, now led by Hülegü’s subordinate, Kitbuga. While they waited, Baybars, the Egyptian commander, was actually received at the Crusading court.
Baybars was a Mameluke and a ferociously ambitious character, who had already asserted the power of the Mameluke institution in Egypt by murdering one sultan and replacing him with another. He may have had a hand in the decision taken to murder the Mongol envoys who had been sent by Kitbuga with the usual demand for submission. This act of defiance, particularly provocative in view of the Mongols’ known commitment to vengeance as a casus belli, ensured that battle would ensue. So it did; the Mongols advanced from their encampments in Syria into northern Palestine and on 3 September 1260, at Ain Jalut (the Spring of Goliath) north of Jerusalem, they and the Egyptian army, commanded by the sultan Qutuz and Baybars, clashed. In a single morning of fighting the Mongols were defeated, Kitbuga captured and killed and the survivors scattered, never to return.
Ain Jalut, the first pitched battle that the Mongols lost, caused a sensation at the time throughout the Christian, Muslim and Mongol world and it continues to be closely studied by historians. Its result is disputed: did it save the Near East from Mongol domination, or was the Mongol horde already at the limit of its strategic and logistic outreach? The tactics of the battle, too, divide historians: was it a brilliant feat of arms by Baybars or did the Egyptian army win by weight of numbers? There is certainly substance to the argument that the Mongol horses had eaten out Syria, as cavalry armies always tended to eat out cultivated land when they left the steppe, and it does appear that Hülegü had taken much of his force with him when he left for Central Asia.87 On the other hand, recent estimates are that as many as 10–20,000 remained under Kitbuga. At the same time, it is now thought that the size of the Egyptian army may have been exaggerated, and that its core of Mamelukes may have numbered no more than 10,000 in a force of 20,000.88 In short, Ain Jalut may have been fought on equal terms and thus have been a truly significant encounter, if not because of its immediate strategic outcome, then because it marked the power of one horse people, organised as a professional force and supported by the revenues of a sedentary state, to overcome that of another still living by pillage and animated by the primitive values of tribalism and vengeance.
We have already noted the judgement of Abu Shama that ‘it was a remarkable thing that the [Mongols] were defeated and destroyed by men of their own kind’, a reference to the presence of large numbers of Turks on both sides. Certainly the battle appears to have been fought in traditional steppe fashion, with the Egyptians advancing to contact with the Mongols, feigning retreat at the moment of action and drawing their pursuers to follow them to a site where the ground favoured a sudden counter-attack. Nevertheless, the turning-point seems to have been the moment when Sultan Qutuz launched himself into the mêlée with the cry ‘O Islam’ — a reminder to us that the Mamelukes were the military servants of a war-making religion while their opponents shared no common creed.89 It was also supremely important that Baybars’ men had a great deal of military experience, won against the still-formidable Crusaders, and reinforced by the endless drill and discipline of the Mameluke school of war. If it is not correct to speak of Baybars’ Mamelukes as an army in the modern sense, their tactics had not yet fossilised into the anachronism they were later to become when confronted by Ottoman gunpowder, were quite appropriate to the challenge the Mongols presented and demonstrate in retrospect the ‘value-added’ effect of training lent to one force when engaged with an equivalent relying instead on élan and reputation.
After Ain Jalut, the Mongols had no further surprises to unleash on the civilised world, nor did any other horse people. That judgement may seem to do less than justice to Tamerlane who, in his time as conqueror (1381–45), spread even more terror than Genghis had done, and over almost as wide an area. Tamerlane, however, lacked even such administrative ability as Genghis had shown and, in his practice of exemplary terror, destroyed the foundations of anything he might have built upon.90
Tamerlane possessed the warrior spirit; born Timur, he became known as Timur-leng or Tamer the Lame after an early wounding that left him with a limp. He encouraged a pitiless quality of atrocity in his soldiers; it is from his campaigns, rather than those of Genghis, that derive the memories of towers and pyramids of skulls.91 He seems, however, to have been possessed by nothing more than the warlike urge, refusing his followers all opportunity to enjoy the fruits of victory, but seeking forever new worlds to conquer. It was a thankful relief to the civilisations on the steppe border when he died just before setting out to contest possession of Kublai Khan’s conquests with the restored native Ming dynasty in China. By the end of the fourteenth century, Mongol power had effectively been extinguished wherever it had spilled over the edge of the steppe; only in India, and then in a form so heavily Islamicised as to make its Genghisid and Timurid origins unrecognisable, was it to have a future.
What, then, was the Mongol legacy? To have caused the dispersion of Turkic peoples to three corners of the earth — China, India and the Middle East — is thought by one historian to have been the principal outcome, with all that that implied for the military histories of those three regions. Certainly, Genghis Khan, by displacing westward the then insignificant tribe of Ottomans, initiated a sequence of events that devastated the established order in the Near East, replaced it with another that survived into this century, and held Europe under threat of an Islamic offensive that persisted from the fall of Constantinople in 1453 until the raising of the siege of Vienna 230 years later.
Through their intimate involvement with the European world, however, the Ottomans were forced into a military compromise between the steppe Blitzkrieg and the sedentary warfare of fortifications and heavy infantry whose opposed tendencies they never managed to reconcile. They succeeded in founding their own disciplined, regular heavy infantry force, but only on the basis of a slave system (the Janissaries), which eventually fossilised it as it fossilised the Mamelukes; at the same time they persisted in encumbering themselves in their Asiatic domains with a horse-riding aristocracy whose nomadic lawlessness proved ineradicable; these Anatolian chieftains became effectively independent of the Turkish sultan in the eighteenth century.92
Nevertheless, it is in the Ottomans’ attempts at compromise between their steppe heritage and the challenge of their confrontation with the urban and agricultural West that one perceives the true significance of what the horse peoples brought to warfare. No doubt the ecological explanation of their failure to carry their conquests off the grasslands, or, if they did so, of their subsequent abandonment of steppe culture, is correct. Permanent pasture can be maintained only by intensive effort in irrigated or naturally forested lands; such effort requires a settled population that needs agriculture to support it; agriculture and pasturage are incompatible; therefore invaders intent on grazing large strings of horses had either to retreat to their proper habitat or change their ways. The horse peoples, as we have seen, did one or the other. Whatever the outcome, however, the military habits of the worlds into which they made their irruptions were changed by the experience for ever.
The horse-riding peoples, like the charioteers before them, brought to warmaking the electric concept of campaigning over long distances and, when campaigning resolved itself into battle, of manoeuvering on the battlefield at speed — at least five times the speed of men on foot. As protectors of their flocks and herds against predators, they also preserved the spirit of the hunter, lost to agriculturalists except of the lordly class; in their management of animals they showed a matter-of-factness — in mustering, droving, culling, slaughter for food — that taught direct lessons about how masses of people on foot, even inferior cavalrymen, could be harried, outflanked, cornered and eventually killed without risk. These were practices that primitive hunters, with their empathetic relationship with their quarry and mystic respect for the stricken prey, would have found intrinsically alien. To the horse peoples, equipped with their principal weapon, the composite bow, itself a product of the animal tissues which supported their way of life, killing at a distance — of emotional detachment as well as physical space — was second nature.
It was the emotional detachment of the horse warriors, ultimately manifest in their deliberate practice of atrocity, which the settled peoples found so terrifying. It nevertheless rubbed off on them. Of the two characteristics of ‘primitive’ warfare that persisted well into the development of civilisation — tentativeness of encounter and association of ritual and ceremony with combat and its aftermath — the horse peoples had truck with neither. They may have made a practice of retreating before an enemy who showed fight; but this was a feigned manoeuvre, designed to draw an opponent out of a chosen position, disorder his ranks and expose him to a disabling counter-attack; in no way did they equate with the primitive warrior’s unwillingness to come to hand strokes. When a horse horde closed in for the kill, it slaughtered without compunction. There was absolutely no hint, moreover, of ritual or ceremony in the actions of a horse horde. The horse peoples fought to win — quickly, completely and quite unheroically. Eschewal of heroic display was, indeed, almost a nomad rule. Genghis himself, though wounded by an arrow early in his rise to power, was physically timid and later took no exposed part in the battles where he was nominally in command.93 Western warriors found it a most bewildering characteristic of nomad tactics that the leader’s position in the typical crescent formation was unidentifiable, since he usually rode inconspicuously far from the centre, where an Alexander or a Lionheart would have put himself on view.
The habit of heroic display clung to Western concepts of military leadership for a very long time.94 If the horse peoples failed to dissuade would-be heroes among their enemies from taking the attendant risks, they were undeniably successful in transmitting their unceremonious concern to win. In Eastern Europe, as the military historian Christopher Duffy has noted, warfare on the European continent first assumed the racialist and totalitarian character that insidiously came to pervade it everywhere; he ascribes this to Mongol influence on ‘the Russian character and Russian institutions, [leading to] the brutalisation of the peasantry, a denial of human dignity and a distorted sense of values which reserved a special admiration for ferocity, tyrannical ways and slyness’.95 Steppe ferocity also made its way into Europe by a southerly route, first through the Seljuk advance into Anatolia, then by the Ottoman conquest of the Balkans; war on the Ottoman frontier was for centuries the fiercest in Europe. It may also have filtered back through the Crusaders’ encounter with Islam.
If Crusading may be seen as the mirror image of jihad, it was not until Saladin confronted the Latin kingdoms that they found themselves with a real fight on their hands; but Saladin was a product of Islam’s energetic response to the challenge from the steppe, while the core of his army of Turkish slave soldiers were expert in the ferocious tactics of mounted archery. Crusading in the East brought back into Europe habits learned there; they may have been translated into the northern Crusades against the pagan Slavs — themselves under attack by the steppe peoples from the opposite direction; eventually they penetrated Spain, where the knights of the Reconquista fought Islam with a ruthlessness Genghis would have applauded. War à outrance certainly took root in Spain; it is not fanciful to suggest that the awful fate of the Incas and the Aztecs — the latter still trapped in the pathetically inappropriate ceremonialism of the flower battles — at the hand of the Spanish conquistadors ultimately harked back to Genghis himself.
In China, the empire with which the horse people of the steppe were most intimately connected, Mongol habits of warmaking perhaps had their most durable effect. ‘The Chinese Way of Warfare’, as John King Fairbank has reminded us, preserved from primitivism practices of ritual and ceremony — including divination and displays of prowess by champions before battle — that persisted much longer than in any other great civilisation;96 but it also included a unique ethical component, derived from theConfucian code central to Chinese public life, that was best expressed by the idea that ‘the superior man should be able to attain his ends without violence’.97 The Turkic invaders whom the Chinese absorbed during the first millennium AD were brought to accept that ethic, even though they retained their pride in the steppe warrior’s skills of riding and archery. By the violence of the reaction necessary to overthrow the Mongols, after the conquest by Kublai, however, the Ming emperors were obliged to impose on their fellow Chinese a regime more absolutist than any known before. The Ming, in effect, militarised China and created a hereditary military class; it was under the Ming that China embarked on its only sustained effort at overseas expansion, and its largest effort to control the steppe by direct offensive action; five great expeditions were mounted by the dynasty north of the Great Wall, which was also then rebuilt in the form we see today. The military effort to restore traditional China had an unattended and largely contrary result: ‘the Ming regime which cast out the Mongol Yüan dynasty became more despotic in its image, imitated some features of the Yüan military system, and remained transfixed by the menace of a revival of Mongol military power.’98
The Ming were right to persist in their fear of the barbarians from the steppe, but when a new menace appeared to overthrow them in the seventeenth century, it was mounted, ironically, not by the Mongols but by one of their hereditary enemy peoples, the Manchus.
The Manchus were not strictly a horse people, since they had become largely settled, sinicised and mercantile before they left Manchuria. But the core of their army was cavalry, and they brought to perfection the Mongol technique of using military power to make the Chinese administrative system work for them.
This was an achievement not only on the military level but even more on the level of political organisation. The secret of this in turn was the nomads’ capacity to work with Chinese of the border region and through this collaboration combine under one regime the skills of violent warfare by non-Chinese and of administration through trustworthy Chinese underlings — how to seize power and how to keep and use it.99
Unfortunately the power of the Ming dynasty that the Manchus seized in China was a heavily Mongolised version of the Chinese ideal of government, and they kept and used it by the principle of altering it not at all. The best of the Ch’ing emperors became, in the eighteenth century, paternal despots, who patronised the intelligentsia, encouraged the arts, sponsored the rise of trade and banking, and instituted the mildest fiscal regime the peasantry of China had ever known. The penalty for this benevolence, however, was ‘hypertrophy of the centralised bureaucracy’. Nothing could be decided except by reference to Peking, while the civil servants trapped within the regime were the products of a system of competitive examination and education which ‘strengthened inhibitions’.100Hypertrophy arrested the Chinese genius for adaptation. China had once been a civilisation of scientific enquiry and technical development, but under the Manchus all attempts at change, material as well as intellectual, fell under suspicion. In Japan, in the same period, technological change was outlawed in the interests of preserving a certain social order and the dominance of a native ruling class; in China, to preserve an alien ruling class, technological change was stifled rather than outlawed. Whereas in Japan the samurai eventually came to see that their future lay in embracing Western science and industry, the Manchus and their mandarins could not make the leap into modernity. We can assemble evidence of many influences to suggest why not. Ultimately, however, the failure was due to the Manchus’ very foreignness, their origins as conquerors from the steppe, and the consequent ossification of their military system which, as the basis of their power, they shrank from updating. There is no more pathetic episode in military history than that of the Manchu bannermen of the nineteenth century pitting their outmatched composite bows against the rifles and cannon of the European invaders.
A long telescope allows us to see that the fighting powers of the Europeans who waged the nineteenth-century opium wars against China had been sharpened long ago and far away by their ancestors’ encounter with the Manchus’ horse-people ancestors. The European armies of the age of imperialism owed one pillar of their efficiency to a principle established off the steppe: that of bureaucratic organisation, founded in Sumer and Assyria, translated through Persia to Macedon, Rome and Byzantium, and artificially revived from classical sources at the Renaissance. They owed another, that of commitment to the pitched battle, to the Greeks. All the others — long-range campaigning, high-speed manoeuvre on the battlefield, effective missile technology, the application of the wheel to warfare and, above all, mutuality between horse and warrior — had their origins on the steppe and its borderlands. We may even ascribe to the later Turks and Mongols credit for taking from Islam that creed’s revolutionary contribution to warmaking — its detachment from considerations of family, race, territory or particular political forms — and investing it with the force of an idea: that war could be an autonomous activity and the warrior’s life a culture in itself. It was that culture, in a diluted but still recognisableform, which Clausewitz encountered among the Cossacks whose ‘unmilitary’ ways so affronted him during the Moscow campaign of 1812. ‘Unmilitary’ it may have been; it had troubled the world nevertheless, for much longer than Clausewitzian strategy was to do, while, in the transmission of its ruthlessness, ferocity and obsession with unconditional victory to the warfare of settled peoples, Clausewitz himself owed much more to it than his ordered mind would ever allow him to recognise.