PART IV THE MONGOL MOMENT

The Rise of Chinggis Khan and the Central Asian Steppe, Followed by Regional Reassertion

Peter Fibiger Bang

500 THE MONGOL MOMENT

Map IV.

By 900, the two main ecumenic empires were a spent force, fragmenting into commonwealths of smaller polities as local elites had slowly hollowed out the power of the imperial courts. Across the great landmass of Afro-Eurasia, however, warrior and state-building elites continued to vie with one another to claim succession to the grand empires of the past and fill out their old symbolic shells. For a time, it looked as if imperial reinvigoration would come through the Song dynasty's (960-1279) successful reconquest of much of the old Tang Empire. On the horizon, however, a stronger force was assembling. Searching for a driver of world history, scholars have sometimes looked to the nomads of the Central Asian steppes. This view is arguably exaggerated; they were far from the most significant source of imperial conquest over the millennia.¹ But this was their moment. A first wave came together with the estab­lishment of several Turk and Mongol polities across Western Asia and the northern regions of China. Most important, perhaps, was the Jurchen Jin dynasty (1115-1234), which, by capturing the capital city of Kaifeng, managed to confine the Song to the south of China. That was only a taste of things to come, though.

Fluid and constantly changing political constellations had limited the capacity of the transmigrant and easily mobilized horse-riding nomadic warriors of Central Asia to assert their dominance over the sedentary populations of the sown.

¹ Though, see Scheidel in vol. 1, Chap. 2. today Hangzhou—the southern seat to which the Song emperors had relocated— surrendered in 1276 with much of the court. Kublai, the great Khan (r. 1260-1294) and grandson of Chinggis, seemed poised to establish a real world monarchy. Much in the style of the old Achaemenid king of kings, he made a point of embracing the many different cultural and religious traditions within a realm whose dimensions had never been matched before.

Yet even for a Great Khan, the extent of the realm was far greater than could be mastered. Since the time of the Achaemenids, on three occasions, seemingly irre­sistible conquerors had swept through the band of Afro-Eurasian sedentary peasant populations and state-making elites. The first was the campaign of Alexander the Great (334-323 bce), which had seen his Greco-Macedonian soldiers traverse the entire Achaemenid world from its westernmost fringes to its eastern extremities along the Indus River. A millennium later, roughly speaking, the armies of the Caliphate had matched and surpassed that feat by adding to the Persian Empire much of the Roman, all along the south Mediterranean coastline reaching up into Spain. Another half millennium on, the Mongols widened the amplitude of the conquering swing even further, from the south of China to the developing Russian principalities on the doorstep of Europe.

The breakup of Mongol power may well have been hastened by the outbreak of another Afro-Eurasian pandemic of bubonic plague. During the middle decades of the fourteenth century, the harrowing Black Death decimated the populations of the sedentarized zones from east to west. It presumably also weakened the man­power reserves of the steppe rulers. Indeed, the intensification of contacts across the vast continent following in the wake of the Mongol armies may have enabled the disease to widen the reservoirs from where the pest could leap from its animal hosts onto human populations. Nevertheless, the earlier, so-called Justinianic plague of the sixth century had ravaged large swaths of Eurasia without the infrastructural support of the vast Mongol Empire; the Pax Mongolica may have been a catalyst, but not the necessary pre-condition; rather, this was the growth of urbanized, com­plex agrarian society.

At any rate, the Mongol moment was passing swiftly. Already in 1368, Zhu Yuanzhang—true to his name, which meant “weapon” in Mandarin—rose up, ousting the descendants of Kublai in China to found the Ming dynasty (Robinson, Chap. 19). Vigorously asserting its power, a set of fabled naval expeditions were soon to proclaim the might and unrivaled grandeur of the new dynasty across Southeast Asia and the Indian Ocean. The fleets were enormous, a colossal manifestation of power intended to arrive in distant harbors and awe rulers into submission. From faraway corners of the world, these navies, under the leadership of the Muslim eu­nuch admiral Zheng He, would bring back rare goods as tribute from foreign and exotic powers. Giraffes, gathered from East Africa, were paraded at court as won­drous omens of the blessed dispensation and universal reach of Ming rule. Once again, the emperors of a new dynasty would proclaim that a golden age had arrived under their just and virtuous gaze.^[1358]

Soon, however, the expeditions were abandoned. The year 1433 marked their end. Historians have seen in this a fateful move, a retrenchment and turning the back on the world, unwittingly vacating the stage of history to European expansion and co­lonialism. Such an assessment is anachronistic. It was a long time before the rulers of “all under heaven” would feel the strains of European competition, let alone any credible threat. Meanwhile, they had more pressing concerns closer to home. Yongle, the very emperor to launch the fleets, moved his capital northward to Beijing, the better to control the Mongols of Inner Asia, the main threat to his monarchy. His armies were also hard at work trying to conquer Vietnam in the south. The fleets, on the other hand, were operating on such a costly scale that the effort would never pay off. In economic terms, they were a drain on resources, not essential to the empire. And from this perspective, the grandiose navies emerge as a form of imperial exu­berance, a sign of the dynamism and strength of post-Mongol empire.

In the literature, the notion of post-nomadic empire has gained currency.^[1359] As the power of the nomads waned after the Mongol moment, rulers again became sed­entary.

In the late eleventh century, Catholic popes had successfully launched the Crusader movement that for a brief period restored Christian control of Jerusalem. But, if success in the Holy Land was short-lived, the movement significantly found emulators elsewhere on the continent to launch crusades of their own to push for­ward the frontier of Christian rule.^[1360] Equally, many Muslim rulers found legitimacy in being a gazi, a warrior for the faith. The towering minaret of Qutb Minar still remains as a grand testimony to the Delhi Sultanate and the powerful groups of Muslim warrior elites that by the end of the twelfth century had established them­selves across North India (Kumar, Chap. 20). Meanwhile, Muslim statecraft was trickling down south through the Sahara, resulting in the rise of the widespread, but loose suzerainty of the Mali and Songhay empires in the West African Sahel (Hall, Chap.

The prospect of universal empire continued to animate the world of kingship, its highest aspiration, not because it was realistic or absolutely achievable, but because the notion epitomized both the price put on military expansion and the quest for supremacy among one's rivals. When Timur, therefore, as one of the most successful conquerors of his generation, received an embassy from the court of the early Ming dynasty that addressed him as a mere tributary ruler, it was treated as an intoler­able affront. A monarch who could countenance presenting himself to the world in cosmic vocabulary as “lord of the auspicious conjunction” was in no mind to accept an inferior position, even if it was in relation to the conveniently distant, if mighty Chinese emperor. The drama was choreographed according to the rules of the age- old grammar of rank and preeminence that we saw emerge among rulers of the third/second millennium BCE (Part I). Insult was returned in a game of tit-for-tat. The embassy was retained in Samarkand. Eventually Timur died in 1405 as he set out on campaign to bring the Ming emperor to yield and submit to Islam.^[1362] However, if the two grandest imperial gestures of the early fifteenth century—the Chinese campaign of Timur and the tributary fleets of the Ming—both proved abortive, this was only in the short run. They were a herald of things to come. The world was about to be pulled more closely together while a spate of universal monarchies rose to preeminence across the world during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.

Bibliography and Guidance

The two massive tomes of Lieberman (2003-2009) may be the most successful at­tempt so far to structure a synthesis of Afro-Eurasian state- and empire- formation around the power of the Central Asian steppe, from the ninth century to the age of colonialism: the majority of sedentary populations lived in areas exposed to attacks from nomads and were subject to the imposition of vast empires; mean­while an outer zone was protected from nomadic conquest and there fragmen­tation prevailed. Abu-Lughod (1989) presented the empire of the great khans as facilitating cultural and economic exchanges across its vast pan-Eurasian space, to form an alternative world system, which flourished before the coming of European commercial hegemony. The classic discussion by McNeill (1976), of how sedentary agricultural populations dynamically interacted with crowd diseases to form a slowly expanding body of societies, could have been included in any of the bibliographies for the part introductions of this volume, but is mentioned here for its suggestion that the intensification of contacts facilitated by the Mongol Empire also generated the conditions that made it possible for the Black Death pandemic to develop and spread. Di Cosmo, Frank, and Golden (2009) and Christian (1998), in combination, provide detail and a longue duree treatment of the polities of the nomadic steppe. Lattimore (1951) is a classic. In general, interpretations that see nomadic power as “shadowing” or rising on the frontier of sedentary societies seem to this author stronger than those that position the dynamics of the steppe as the decisive engine. Cunliffe (2015) for a moderate, Crossley (2019) for a bold and inspired version of “nomadic” world history.

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