Provisioning the Army

Feeding the army on campaign is always a challenge. In legal theory and according to the rules of statecraft, the army was not supposed to take what it needed from the inhabitants, or, more precisely, the army was to pay for what it needed.

In some cases (in particular, it seems, in pre-Mongol times) army com­manders tried to apply this principle. In the late 1030s, when the Ghaznavids were trying to hold Khurasan against the Seljuq Turks, the army changed its position more than once because it caused too much of a strain on local resources and prices were going up too much. But there were situations when a commander could not help taking what was needed by violent means. This was the case when he no longer had the means to pay for food and fodder, for example because he had been beaten and was destitute or did not have any notable fiscal organisation for other reasons.

The last Samanid ruler, al-Muntasir (1000-5), tried very hard to get into some kind of royal position, but never got very far in this endeavour. He therefore relied on violent means (including torture) to provision his retinue. In the intra-Seljuq contest for the throne after the death of Malikshah (1092), his son Barkyaruq (1094-1105) was not above requisitioning foodstuffs (in Nishapur, year 493/1099-1100, in the region of Baghdad the following year, and in Wasit in southern Iraq the next year). He also once saw his army disperse because there was not enough to feed the horses, and evidently he could do nothing about it, losing the fruits of an otherwise brilliant victory.

A ruler who had no money had no other way of feeding his retainers than to have food and other things collected from the people. The otherwise well- regarded Ghurid sultan Shihab al-Din (d. 1206), during his struggle for control of Khurasan against the Khwarazmshah Muhammad b. Tekesh (1200-20), turned to violent requisitioning of foodstuffs because his army had used up its provisions. When this did not suffice, he did something which was consid­ered so unusual that it made people yearn for the victory of the Khwarazmians: he confiscated grain and other foodstuffs which the popula­tion had transported to the shrine of ‘Ali al-Rida, a Twelver Shi'ite imam, at Mashhad, where the goods were under protection (at least that was the conventional view which the Ghurid sultan did not respect).¹¹

There is no doubt that Mongol armies ravaged the countryside even after establishing their rule in Transoxiana (soon after the first invasion in the 1220s) and the Ilkhanate in Iran (in 1265). The most vivid descriptions of Mongol practices of raising revenue come from Rashid al-Din; the bleak picture he draws of the Iranian countryside before Ghazan's reforms (which he himself had devised; Ghazan r. 1295-1305) is in part meant to give more lustre to this achievement, but it is plausible enough that there was more than some truth to these descriptions.^{[96] [97]}

The oppressive and violent behaviour of Mongol warriors and officials did not go without resistance. It is mostly in hagiographic sources that we learn about such events. Thus, in a story set in fourteenth-century Fars, a group of mounted foragers was attacked by the villagers, who killed one of them. The troop sent to carry out reprisals found only four people in the village, the others having fled. In another story, likewise coming from a hagiographic source and likewise set in the fourteenth century, but in the region of Bukhara, a Mongol who tried to cash a tax cheque was also doing harm to some women, and the villagers killed him. The source comments: ‘The death of this oppressor was the reason why many people stayed alive.’¹³ The stories of how the Sarbadar movement in Khurasan started (in around 1360) show a similar structure: Mongol officials had asked village notables to provide them with female company and wine, but in the end they were killed; according to another report, it was a Mongol tax collector who was slain. 1⁴

In the Timurid period, letting the horses graze in the sown fields was very frequent; apparently, not much of a difference was made whether the army was on enemy territory or ‘at home’.15 In the Mongol and Timurid periods, it is clear that the armies lived off the land. Nomads as much as the agricultural population suffered since much of the needed foodstuffs was from animals.