Chapter Four
THE HIGHWAY
OF CIVILIZATIONS
THE EURASIAN STEPPE
And now it seems to me the beautiful uncut hair of graves.
—WALTWHITMAN,“Song of Myself,”
Leaves of Grass
Look how wide also the east is from the west.
—PSALMS103:12
This is where you can feel the wind. You can feel its cold when it blows down the mountainsides of Central Asia, chilling the steppe to forty degrees below zero. You can feel its sting when the dust storms invade your eyes and hair and the pores of your skin. You can feel its blast on a face leathered by summer tanning, or its demonic whimsy in a spring drenching. Scorched in autumn, parts of the steppe are covered in winter with a sheet of snow so thin that livestock can dig through to the grass with their hooves. The usual steppeland topography is featureless and flat, but some of its recesses are scattered with surprises. In 1856 , the Russian geographer Pietr Semenov set out to cross it “or die in the attempt.” He had spent his childhood in the black-earth steppe of Riazan and was unprepared for the novelties he encountered farther east: the “dome-like porphyry hills” and ridges of the Kirgiz, the scattered woodland of the “forest steppe.”1The variety is, in general, the variety of extremes, but, like all creatures of changeable moods, the steppeland climate sometimes conceals its rigors under a mask of charm—even of serenity. When Jorgen Bisch drove through the Mongolian steppe in 1962 , he stopped by roadside cairns—which mark the passage of centuries of riders—to admire the ripple of the windthrough the grass, as it turns from gray to silver under fierce sun and drifting cloud. He passed acres of wild flowers that grew in soil never tended by men: pure, bright edelweiss, crimson catchfly, yellow toadflax, dead nettle, “and a sea of lady’s bedstraw.”2A similar experience of the steppe was reported by a traveler to the Don two hundred years ago:
The earth seemed covered with the richest and most beautiful blossoms. . . . Even in the heat of the day, refreshing breezes wafted a thousand odors and all the air was perfumed. The skylark was in full song and various insects with painted wings either filled the air or were seen crouching in the blossoms. . . . Turtle doves as tame as domestic pigeons flew about our carriage.3
It is easy to admire the wilderness from a carriage or car. But by those lookingin on it from outside, in less protected circumstances, the steppe had always been seen as a source of destruction—the cradle of monsters, the kennels of rabid dog-headed men, the heartland of the Hun. Here, Alexander, according to romance, bound Gog and Magog behind gates of brass. The gates were left unbarred, however, between the Wall of China and the Carpathian Mountains, and there was plenty of space in which nomads could shuttle their herds, fight their wars, and create their volatile empires. Susceptible or prejudiced travelers today can still imagine themselves menaced by a “lurking strain of cruelty.”4
Perhaps because of the demanding environment and the competitive, violent-way of life, this was also a region of impressive and precocious technical developments. In the mid-fifth millennium B.C., the horsemen of Sredny Stog, on the Middle Dnieper, where the river flows east, who filled their middens with horse bones, were the earliest known domesticators of horses. From graves of the third millennium, ahead of any similar achievement in Western Europe, covered wagons have been excavated—arched and hooped and designed to be pulled by oxen as they rumbled on vast wheels of solid wood. They were immured, as if for an afterlife, in stone-lined chambers, supported by pit props under broad, humped cairns of stone. Few other societies in the world at the time were rich enough to bury objects of such size, intricacy, and value. This centrally placed steppeland region of wheeled vehicles may have been a nursery of traction technology for peoples from the Atlantic to the China Sea. The earliest known vehicle which is recognizable as a chariot dates from early in the second millennium B.C. in the southern Urals.5The wagon burials of the steppes, by the first millennium B.C., were filled with the cunning of smiths, which could be turned to ironwork or jewelwork. A transhumant life—or even a nomadic one—allows leisure for technical inventiveness and artistic glory, by which neighboring sedentarists are sometimes dazzled and always menaced. Also on the steppe, the stirrup was invented—the secret weapon that enabled nomad cavalry to terrorizefarming folk for centuries before the victims caught up with the technology. Meanwhile, urban life took shape in oases and mountain foothills around the edges of the steppe.6
In one mood, ancient Greek writers sensed that the steppe-dwellers whom they called Scythians and Sarmatians belonged to an alien world, wild and threatening. Herodotus, who found them intensely interesting, reported the dreamlike findings of Aristeas of Proconnesus, who, “possessed by Phoebus,” undertook a mysterious journey into the world beyond the Don, towards the lands of “the one-eyed Arimaspians, beyond whom are the griffins that guard gold, and beyond these again are the Hyperboreans, whose territory reaches to the sea.” He never returned to tell the tale in life, but made his report—in verse, as befitted a poet—as a ghost.7
At another level, the steppelanders were partners of regular trade: depicted by Greek craftsmen in everyday scenes, milking ewes or stitching their mantles of unshorn sheepskin. These images were produced under the patronage of Scythian princes and are echoed in their own goldsmith work, like the spherical gold cup from a royal tomb at Kul-Oba, between the Sea of Azov and the Black Sea, where bearded warriors in tunics and leggings are shown at peace or, at least, in the intervals of war: dressing one another’s wounds, fixing their teeth, mending their bowstrings, unhobbling their horses, and telling campfire tales. Their reputation was as huntsmen first and warriors second—even on the battlefield they could be distracted by a running hare. This was evidently their selfperception, too, for the hare course was a favorite theme of their art; on a terra-cotta figure, for instance, from Kerch in the Crimea, the hooded hunter joins his dog in the chase.8
Greek and Celtic trade goods filled princely graves in the Volga Valley in the second half of the first millennium B.C. In and around the Crimea, the Scythians had access to the heritage of the Greek emporia of the Bosporan kingdom. Here was the “Scythian Neapolis,” a courtly center covering forty acres within a stone wall: the Scythians’ greatest town—perhaps their only town, since the settlements deeper inside Scythian territory may have belonged to other people, Finnic, maybe, tolerated for their fiscal potential. Metropolitan fashion could be found in the steppes. The Sarmatian queen of the first century A.D. who stares, in Greek attire and coiffure, from the center of a jeweled diadem found at Khokhlac-Novocherkasek, between the Dnieper and the Don, looks as if she fancied herself as Athena. Above her head, elaborately wrought deer feed on golden fig-leaves—or perhaps, in the steppeland tradition, they are antlercrowned horses: the rigs for such a disguise are known in a mixture of felt, copper, and gilded horsehair from Siberian graves of the fifth century B.C.9
Not all steppeland peoples, however, stayed put long enough to become familiar or companionable to their neighbors. The steppe is a giant causeway which encourages long migrations, the horse a powerful conveyance. At eitherend of the steppe, the civilizations at the extremities of Eurasia repeatedly found newcomers deposited on their doorsteps or intruded into their domain. At each arrival or invasion, the process of acculturation or assimilation, repulsion or conversion had to be repeated. Between the fifth and tenth centuries, for instance, Christendom absorbed or destroyed intruders in successive “waves”: the Huns, whose lifeblood seemed to be sapped when Attila burst a blood vessel on his wedding night; the Avars, whom Charlemagne found enfeebled by ease and bloated with booty when he finally rounded them up; the Bulgars, who swapped for the holy chalice the human skulls favored, beneath the walls of Constantinople, for the potations of the sublime khan Krum; and the Magyars, who made a home from home in the Hungarian prairie and became Christian paladins, honored and wooed in Byzantium and Rome. Western Europe was an “invasion land.”10
In the same period, China had a series of similar experiences. At the very moment of the Hunnic invasion of the Roman empire, in the mid-fifth century, the Khitans arrived in China—victims, perhaps, of a single, unknown steppeland catastrophe—to take up relatively civilizing enterprises: horse-trading, millet-farming, and, eventually, a rival “Chinese” empire of their own. Meanwhile, Uighurs, Kirgiz—with their cavalry reputedly a hundred thousand strong—and other Turkic peoples established varying degrees of clientage with China: driven back, in some cases, into the steppe, or bought off, in others, with tribute disguised as gifts, or else held warily beyond territorial markers, such as the Great Wall, keeping frontier settlements in a permanent state of unease. The Uighurs represent an impressive case of insecure Sinicization: they built a city “rich in agriculture” with twelve iron gates but continued to make terrifying cross-border raids. In 759 , the Chinese princess of Ning-kuo, who had been given, against her will, in marriage to a Uighur khagan, was spared the ritual immolation which, by Uighur tradition, awaited her at her husband’s death. She agreed instead to “slash her face and weep after their custom.”11
A Confucian Contemplates the Wild
The Chinese response to the ever-presence of these barbarians—an attitude-of apprehension, allayed by confidence in the civilizing potential of cultural-contacts—can be traced in the life and work of one of the empire’s most remarkable scholar-administrators, Ou-yang Hsiu. It is worth taking a moment to review his life of tragic twists, which shows that in high politics some things never change. He was born in 1007 in Szechwan, where his father was a minor official; his family had only lately sprung from obscurity. His father died when he was four and he was raised by an uncle in a provincial backwater he later recalledwith distaste—“crude and uncultured Sui-chou”—where he became a model of strenuous self-civilization.
In my youth I lived east of the Han river. That was a remote and uncultured region, one that had no scholars. Moreover, my family was poor and did not own any books. However, south of the city there was a prominent family, named Li, whose son was devoted to learning. As a boy, I often played in his house. One day I noticed a tattered basket, lodged in a hollow in the wall, that contained some old books. . . . They were full of blanks and misprints, and the pages were all out of order. I asked the Li for permission to take them home with me.12
He failed the civil-service exams twice because of his unconventional prose style: the first sign of an individualist itch, a radical attitude to tradition, which would both make and mar his career. Though he became renowned as a thinker and an administrator, his talent for writing was his greatest gift, and the foundation of a reputation which endures to this day. “Since writing is the fish-trap that contains the Way,” he said, “can one be careless about how it is constructed?”13
At the third attempt, he passed the examinations near the top of the list, under-guidance of an academician who was impressed by his literary promise. During-routine appointments in the provinces, he felt powerless and marginalized:
When the gate of the public market opens at dawn, traders rush into it and merchants take up their positions inside. Some people come carrying valuables they want to sell, and others come with cash looking for things to buy. Then there are also idle men without any resources who simply roam about with their sleeves rolled up. The city of Loyang itself might be thought of as the largest public market in the world. There are those who come here hoping to sell something, and there are those who sit in its midst appraising and purchasing the goods that are brought in. I reside in this great market place, but neither my official position, nor my learning, nor my conduct is sufficient to influence others, and my opinions about right and wrong are not heeded by others. I am one of those without any resources who roam about with their sleeves rolled up.14
In 1034 , Ou-yang Hsiu made the great leap forward of a bureaucratic career:-translation to the capital as an imperial librarian. In a faction-ridden court, he was bound to be unpopular. Most fellow members of the “reformist” faction demanded pure meritocratic standards as a way of wresting patronage from the grip of the party in power. Ou-yang Hsiu, however, really believed in reform asa way of improving the quality of the service rendered to the emperor. When he wrote a defense of a disgraced reformist, he was demoted and exiled to Yi-ling, at the mouth of the Yangtze Gorges, in a “strange, half-civilized land.”
This accident of power politics took him to China’s wild west, a colonial frontier to be Sinicized and exploited in response to the Khitan menace. Settlers were infesting Szechwan, lured by the salt wells, those “springs of avarice,” and by the opportunities to grow tea and mulberries. A “pacification campaign” was launched against the indigenous tribes. Symbolically of the new order, the “ forbidden hills” became denuded of forests in the interests of road-building and the construction of dwellings. Gradually, the two moieties of Szechwan—the romantic wilderness of “streams and grottoes” in the mountainous east, the enviable “heavenly storehouse” in the rich west—became inalienably Chinese.
Ou-yang Hsiu captured the pioneer spirit of a civilizing enterprise in a rugged world, both in his poetry, in which every line makes frontier life vivid—
Purple bamboo and blue forests rise to shroud the sun.
Green shrubs and red oranges glow out of the face of autumn
Like make-up. The paths are steep everywhere, men bend under heavy
loads.
Living beside rivers, the natives are strong swimmers.
New Year’s fish- and salt-markets bustle each morning.
Drums and flutes at unauthorized shrines play the entire holiday.
Winds roar like fire, echoing in the deserted town.
Heavy rains send cliffs tumbling into the river.15
—and in the music of his beloved zither:
. . . at its best it resembles a cliff crumbling into a ravine and boulders splitting apart, a spring gushing forth from lofty mountains, a rainstorm striking in the dead of night, the forlorn sighs of embittered men and lonely women, the affectionate love-calls of a pair of birds. Its depth of sorrow and meaning makes it the heir of the music of . . . Confucius.16
His career was held back by partisan opponents at court and a spell of exile in a frontier region. During the 1030s, however, he at last achieved a string of official appointments at the imperial court, first as a librarian and later as a reviewer of policies and drafter of edicts. He was able to take part in a sort of “renaissance”—a revival of ancient ethics and letters, an alliance of purity of style with probity in morals. He and his fellow partisans reformed the examination system with two objectives in mind: to encode in it an ethos of service to society,and to recruit the state’s servants from as wide a range of backgrounds as possible. The old examination tested only skill in composition, especially in verse, and in memorizing texts. The new test asked questions about ethical standards and about how the state could serve the people better.
Ou-yang Hsiu’s own essays make it plain that this was a conservative revolution. He aimed to restore the “perfection of ancient times”—an ideal age “when rites and music reached everywhere.” His personal culture aligned him with a type familiar in almost every great courtly society: urbane, world-weary, with well-manicured sensibilities. His poems in praise of singing girls and strong drink made him vulnerable to the moralists in his own party and the watchdogs of the opposition.
He was a self-indulgent moralist in a sententious and emulous atmosphere; the result was predictable. Ou-yang Hsiu was dogged by accusations of sleaze. He tripped over his own principle: “Integrity and shame are the premier methods for anchoring the self. Without integrity everything is acceptable. Without shame anything is done.”17
First, in 1045 , he was accused by his niece and ward of raping her before her marriage. He was acquitted of the major charge but disgraced for registering land bought with her dowry under his family name. His career was interrupted by three years of exile in Chu-chou, where, he claimed, he got drunk every day. His restored favor at court lasted through the period of the reformists’ supremacy, but in 1067 a further scandal broke, from which Ou-yang Hsiu never fully recovered. He was arraigned—apparently maliciously, as no evidence was ever cited—for incest with his oldest daughter-in-law and removed to a series of provincial governorships, from which he was not allowed to retire until 1071 .
Meanwhile, he witnessed the triumph of a more radical faction, of whom he disapproved: the party led by Wang An-shih was guided by a mystical idealism, inspired by Buddhism, from which Ou-yang recoiled. Wang thought life was like a dream and valued “dream-like merits” equally with practical results. He carried the notion of the social responsibilities of government to remarkable extremes and sought counsel from “peasants and serving-girls.”18He made present problems, not antique models, the starting points of reform. Ou-yang retired into the detachment and oblivion of his “old tippler’s pavilion,” anxious only “lest future generations laugh at me.”19
Throughout his official life, he advocated an equally resigned attitude to the problem of steppelander enmity. In the long run, he maintained, civilization would always win encounters with barbarism; the barbarian would be shamed into submission when he could not be coerced; influenced by example when he could not be controlled by might; deflected by fingertips when he could not be pummeled by fists; “subjected by benevolence” when he could not be won by war. In a fellow reformer’s words:
. . . put away . . . armor and bows, use humble words and . . . generous gifts . . . send a princess to obtain friendship, . . . transport goods to establish firm bonds. Although this will diminish the emperor’s dignity, it could for a while end fighting along the three borders. . . . Who would exhaust China’s resources . . . to quarrel with serpents and swine? Barbarian attacks in earlier times were merely compared with the sting of gadflies and mosquitoes. . . . Now is the moment for friendship and resisting popular clamor. If indeed Heaven . . . causes the rogues to accept our humaneness and they . . . extinguish the beacons on the frontiers, that will be a great fortune to our ancestral altars.20
It was a policy adopted without pleasure. Ou-yang Hsiu recalled the story of an ancient princess married off to appease a northern prince: “Who would marry a Han daughter to the barbarians?” She set a face like jade against the unfeeling sands and wind and composed music to console her loneliness. “The jade face died in exile at the edge of the world,” but the music returned home, where delicate-fingered girls mastered it in inner chambers, unable even to imagine the sallow skies which inspired it or the yellow clouds of the borderland roads. “How would they know these tunes can break one’s heart?”21
The Making of Mongol Imperialism
Throughout this period, and for the next two hundred years, the steppeland was a cauldron of peoples, constantly restirred, occasionally boiling over, perilous to dip into. Neighbors who thought themselves civilized rarely dared to go there. In the thirteenth century, all that changed; for the first time in history—as far as we know—a single state developed which embraced the whole of the steppe.
Like all great revolutions, the episode began bloodily and became constructive. When the Mongol alliance, which was the core of the engrossing state, first challenged its neighbors, it seemed to threaten civilization with destruction—slaughtering sedentarists, razing cities, despising what its enemies regarded as high culture. Yet it came to play a unique and reforming role in the history of civilization in Eurasia. First the peoples beyond the steppe, from Christendom to Japan, were united in fear of the most devastating conquerors the interior had yet bred; then they were joined by a peace which those same conquerors imposed. For a hundred years after the initial horror of the Mongol conquests, the steppe became a highway of fast communication, linking the ends of the landmass and helping transfers of culture across the breadth of two continents.
The Mongol conquests reached farther and lasted longer than those of any previous nomad empire, in part because of the prowess and charisma of one war leader. Genghis Khan’s memory today is twisted between two myths. In the rest of the world, his name is a byword for ruthlessness; in Mongolia, he has been transformed into a national hero (whereas, under communism, he was an almost unmentionable deviationist who detracted from the renown of “typical, peace-loving Mongolians”).22The fascination he exerted in his day on admirers of uncorrupted barbarism is illustrated by the story of Ch’ang-ch’un, a Taoist sage summoned to his presence in 1219 . “Long years in the caverns of the rocks” had made the wise man venerable; yet at the age of seventy-one he was “ready at the call of the Dragon Court” to undertake an arduous three-year journey to meet the khan at the foot of the Hindu Kush. There were sacrifices of principle he would not make even to oblige the khan. He would not travel with recruits for the imperial harem, or venture “into a land where vegetables were unavailable”—by which he meant the steppe. Yet he crossed the Gobi, climbed “ mountains of huge cold,” and braved wildernesses where his escorts smeared their horses with blood to discourage demonic assailants.23An inscription by one of his disciples ascribed to Genghis Khan words expressive of the qualities Ch’angch’un admired: “Heaven is weary of the inordinate luxury of China. I remain in the wild region of the north. I return to simplicity and seek moderation once more. As for the garments that I wear and the meals that I eat, I have the same rags and the same food as cowherds and grooms, and I treat the soldiers as my brothers.”24
The violence endemic in the steppes turned outwards to challenge neighboring civilizations. Genghis Khan was able to impose or induce unprecedented political unity in the steppeland world. The confederation of tribes he put together really did represent a combined effort of the steppe-dwellers against the sedentarists who surrounded them. It was animated by a single, simple ideology: the God-given right of the Mongols to conquer the world, enforced by terror. After Genghis Khan’s death, the energy conquests generated took Mongol armies to the banks of the Elbe in 1241 and of the Adriatic in 1258 . They reached the edge of Africa in 1260 . In 1276 , they completed the laborious conquest of China, impressing infantry to cross the rice fields, where Mongol cavalry could not operate, and acquiring siege trains to reduce the cities for which their traditional tactics did not prepare them.
There was a tragic air of desperation in letters from the Chinese court as the Mongols closed in for the kill. In 1274 , the Chinese empress mother, Hsie Ch’iao, reflected on where the blame lay.
The empire’s descent into peril is due, I regret, to the insubstantiality of our moral virtue. The heart of a benevolent and caring Heaven was expressed through the stars, yet we failed to stir. Mutations in theearth’s orbit were portended through flooding, yet we failed to reflect. The sound of woeful lament reverberated throughout the countryside, yet we failed to investigate. The pall of hunger and cold enveloped the armed forces, yet we failed to console.25
The last battle was the battle of Ch’angchao in 1275 . The poet I T’ing-kao was there:
A million men ride in from the west. No strength to resist, Alone in battle and preparing to die, smelling the acrid dust of the field. In search of what befell, no elders survive to recall A setting sun on top of the wall, the green iridescence of the dead.26
In February 1276 , with his last advisers fleeing, and his mother packed for flight, the young emperor wrote his abdication letter to the Mongol khan:
As ruler of the great Sung empire, I, Chao Hsien, respectfully bow a hundred times in submitting this document to Your Majesty, the Benevolent, Brilliant, Spiritual and Martial Emperor. . . . I, Your Servant, and the Grand Dowager have lived, day and night, in anxiety and fear. Inevitably, we considered our own mutual preservation by continuing the monarchy in exile. . . . Yet the Mandate of Heaven having shifted, Your Servant chooses to change with it. . . . Your Servant may be alone and infirm, yet my heart is full with emotions, and these cannot countenance the prospect of the abrupt annihilation of the three hundred year old Imperial altars of my ancestors. Whether they be misguidedly abandoned or specially preserved intact rests solely with the revitalized moral virtue you bring to the throne.27
A month later, another poet, Wang Yuan-ling, waited in Linan, the last stronghold of the old empire, while the final instruments of surrender were drawn up, hearing
Crowds of courtiers in lofty royal chambers . . . Behind pearl-studded blinds As myriads of cavalry with curly beards lurch before the chambers.28
Such were the scenes of state. The human trauma could be measured in some of the grief-stricken literature which survives: the suicide notes, the cries of longing for loved ones who disappeared in the chaos, massacred or enslaved. Years later, Ni Pi-chu’ang, bailiff of a Taoist monastery, recalled the loss of hiswife. “I still do not know if you were taken because of your beauty or if surrounded by horses you can still buy cosmetics.”29
Wherever the Mongol armies went, their reputation preceded them: Armenian sources warned Westerners of the approach of “precursors of Antichrist . . . of hideous aspect and without pity in their bowels . . . who rush with joy to carnage as if to a wedding-fest or orgy.” Rumors piled up in Germany, France, Burgundy, even Spain, where Mongols had never been heard of before but now became the bogeys of hunted imaginations. They looked like monkeys, it was said, barked like dogs, ate raw flesh, drank their horses’ urine, knew no laws, and showed no mercy.30“My greatest joy,” Genghis Khan is reliably reported to have said, “is to shed my enemies’ blood and wring tears from their womenfolk.”31Mongol sieges routinely culminated in massacres; that of Herat comprehended the entire population of the city. When the Mongols captured Baghdad, the last caliph was trampled to death—an act of desecration calculated to express the Mongols’ contempt for their enemies.
Yet there was more to the Mongols than the image suggested. As his career progressed, Genghis Khan became a visionary lawgiver, a patron of letters, an architect of enduring empires. To understand the Mongols’ constructive power, which overlay their destructive force, you have to turn from the barbarities of the battlefield to see them at home, where they led a way of life still recognizable among the tents and herds of steppeland nomads today. We can reconstruct what it was like to meet them in the pages left by a Franciscan envoy who recorded vivid details of his mission to the court of Genghis Khan’s successor in 1253 . After taking leave of the king of France, who hoped for a diplomatic understanding with the Mongols, he crossed the Black Sea by ship in May and set out across the steppe by wagon.
“After three days,” he recorded, “we found the Mongols, and I really felt as if I were entering some other world.” By November, he had reached Kenkek, “famished, thirsty, frozen and exhausted.” In December, he was high in the dreaded Altai Shan, where he chanted the Creed “among dreadful crags, to put the demons to flight.” At last, on Palm Sunday, 1254 , he entered the Mongol capital, Karakorum. Then it still looked little more permanent than a camp. Today, it is a ruin.32
Friar William of Rubruck always insisted that he was a simple missionary, but he was treated as an ambassador and evinced the skills of a master of espionage. He realized that the seasonal migrations of Mongol life had a scientific basis and were calculated for military efficiency. “Every commander,” he noticed, “according to whether he has a greater or smaller number of men under him, is familiar with the limits of his pasture lands and where he ought to graze in summer and winter, in spring and autumn.”33
Little useful intelligence escaped William. But he also had a characteristic friar’s interest in the culture he wanted to convert. His observations werepassed for centuries. In a Mongol ger —or tent dwelling—today, you can still observe the layout, the disposition of goods and furnishings, the social space and way of life William described.34
The construction was based on a hoop of interlaced branches, “and its supportsare made of branches, converging at the top around a smaller hoop, from which projects a neck like a chimney.” The covering was of white felt, smeared with chalk and ground bones, or blackened, “and they decorate the felt around the neck at the top with various fine designs.” Patchwork over the entrance was adorned with birds, animals, trees, and vines.
These dwellings are constructed of such size as to be on occasions thirty feet across. I myself once measured a breadth of twenty feet between the wheel-tracks of a wagon, and when the dwelling was on the wagon it projected beyond the wheels by at least five feet on either side. I have counted twenty-two oxen to one wagon, hauling along a dwelling. . . . The wagon’s axle was as large as a ship’s mast, and one man stood at the entrance to the dwelling on top of the wagon, driving the oxen.35
Inside, the domestic arrangements were as they are today.
When they unload their dwelling houses, they always turn the doorway towards the south and . . . draw up the wagons with the chests half a stone’s throw away from the dwelling on either side, so that the dwelling stands between two rows of wagons as if they were two walls.36
There was one tent for each of the wives who belonged to the master of the household. The master’s couch faced the entrance at the northern end. In an inversion of Chinese rules of precedence, the women sat on the east side, the men to the master’s right. The onghodd —the felt images in which the ancestral spirits reside—were arrayed around the walls, one each over the heads of master and mistress with a guardian image between them; others, hung respectively with a cow’s udder and a mare’s, adorned the women’s and men’s sides. The household would gather for drinking, preceded by libations, in the tent of the chosen wife of the night. “I should have drawn everything for you,” William assured his readers, “had I known how to draw,” but he managed to wield an accurate pen despite this deficiency.37
William captured vividly the nature of the terrain—so smooth that a single woman could pilot thirty wagons, linked by trailing ropes. “Nowhere,” he wrote, “have they any ‘lasting city’ and of the ‘one to come’”—the heavenly Jerusalem—“they have no knowledge.”
They have divided among themselves Scythia, which extends from the Danube to where the sun rises, and every commander, according to whether he has a greater or smaller number of men under him, is familiar with the limits of his pasturelands and where he ought to graze in summer and winter, spring and autumn.
And he described a diet in which steppeland ecology was reflected. Although the Mongols had flocks of various kinds, the horse was the dominant partner of their ecosystem—almost as vital to them as the American bison was to the human life of the Great Plains. Mare’s milk was their summer food. The intestines and dried flesh of horses which died naturally or had outlived their lifetime usefulness provided jerky and sausages for winter. “Very fine shoes” were made “from the hind part of a horse’s hide.” Drunkenness, induced by potations of the elite drink, fermented mare’s milk, was hallowed by rites: libations sprinkled over the onghodd s and to the quarters of the globe; musical accompaniments; challenges to drinking bouts conveyed by seizing the victim by the ears, tugging vigorously “to make him open his gullet,” and clapping and singing in front of him.38
William also brought the routine of the khan’s court to life and related in detail his conversations with the habitually drunken Mongka, grandson of Genghis Khan—conversations which, despite the khan’s bluster and selfrighteousness, disclose some of the qualities which made the Mongols of his era great: tolerance, adaptability, reverence for tradition. “We Mongols believe,” Mongka said, if William’s understanding of his words can be trusted, “that there is but one God, in Whom we live and in Whom we die, and towards him we have an upright heart.” Spreading his hand, he added, “But just as God has given different digits to the palm, so He has given different religions to men.”39
The steppeland way of life remained unchanged by the Mongol peace, but the conquerors’ flexibility in the face of other cultures is suggested by the tolerance evinced by Mongka Khan—and Kublai Khan expressed himself to Marco Polo in convincingly similar terms. In partial consequence, though they retained their own traditions in their homeland, Mongols were willing to acculturate selectively abroad. In China, for instance, they took on the hues of the society they had conquered. When one of his generals proposed the extermination of ten million Chinese subjects, Genghis Khan decided that a plan be drawn up to get five hundred thousand ounces of silver, eighty thousand pieces of silk, and four hundred thousand sacks of grain from them by taxation. The yak’s tail banner under which Genghis Khan fought was supplemented by his successors with a parasol’s shade. Whereas the founder of the dynasty got about on a pony’s back, his grandson needed four elephants to transport him. Whereas a simple tent was good enough to house his ancestors, Kublai Khan decreed a stately pleasure dome in Shantung, built of gilded canes.
Some of his Chinese subjects resented his foreign ways: the libations of fermented mare’s milk with which he honored his gods, his barbarous banquets of meat, the servants he chose with great freedom from outside the Confucian Elite—indeed, from outside China. Marco Polo reported that all the Chinese
hated the government of the Great Khan, because he set over them steppelanders, most of whom were Muslims, and they could not endure it, since it made them feel they were no more than slaves.
Moreover, the Great Khan had no title to rule the land of China, having acquired it by force. So, putting no trust in the people, he committed the government of the country to Steppelanders, Saracens and Christians who were attached to his household and personally loyal to him, and not natives of China.
Kublai, indeed, remained a Mongol khan; yet he was also, emphatically, a Chinese emperor, who performed the due rites, dressed in the Chinese manner, learned the language, patronized the arts, protected the traditions, and promoted the interests of his Chinese subjects. Marco Polo, who served his court as a sort of male Scheherezade, garnering strange stories from remote corners of the empire, called him “the most powerful master of men, lands and treasures there has ever been in the world from the time of Adam until today.”40
Resistance and the vastness of the world set limits to the Mongol project of universal conquest. In 1241 , Western Christendom was saved when the Mongol hordes were turned back by a succession crisis at home. In 1260 , they were kept out of Africa by a rare defeat—repulsed by the slave army of an Egyptian sultan of exhausting energy, whose boast was that he would rise naked from his bath to answer a dispatch and get his reply from Cairo to Damascus in four days.41In carrying his campaigns south and east of China, Kublai Khan registered only fleeting success. In Java, one native prince was made to replace another, with no permanent gains for the Chinese. In Champa and Vietnam, tribute was levied at a rate too low to meet the cost of the campaigns. Everywhere, initial success was undone by the demands of distance and the intractability of hostile peoples and climates. Java—which might have become, if accessible, the first colony of the world’s first long-range seaborne empire—was protected by the monsoons. From Japan, Kublai’s armies were driven back by kamikaze winds—the divine typhoons which make lee shores a summer death trap.42Western Europe remained safe because of its remoteness and lack of appeal. In 1296 , a Mongol army “like a storm of torture”43attempted an invasion of India and clogged the cities with refugees, but was turned back with many losses.
It is usual in history for conquerors to run out of steam and for nomad-warriorsto get seduced by the soft life of the peoples they conquer. The Mongols were tamed by success. Imperial responsibility and contact with sedentary culturescivilized them. As the Mongol terror reached its limits and turned to peace, it favored the arts of peace. William of Rubruck described the fountain at the palace of Karakorum: a trumpeting angel topped a silver tree, entwined by a gilded serpent and guarded by silver lions; mare’s milk bubbled from their maws while from the branches poured several liquors—made from rice or milk or honey—that were served at the khan’s drinking bouts. The Parisian master who built this contraption was still living in Karakorum.44It was a typical case of how the Mongol road, which stretched across and around the steppe, enabled influences to be exchanged in both directions.
The Mongol Roads: Causeways of Civilization
Once they had learned the benefits of civilization which the road could bring, the Mongols became its highway police. Teams of Mongol horses, for instance, took the envoy John of Piano Carpini three thousand miles in 106 days in 1246 . The routines of the roads seem quaint to us—but formed a vital part of our history. Without the Mongol peace, it is hard to imagine any of the rest of Western history working out quite as it did, for these were the roads that carried Chinese ideas and transmitted technology westwards and opened up European minds to the vastness of the world. The importance of the Mongols’ passage through history does not stop at the frontiers of their empire: it has to be traced as far as its roads led.
They led a unique explorer, Rabban Bar Sauma, from Kublai Khan’s capital-of Ta-tu, to Paris.
It was not by the steppeland highway that he traveled, but by a Mongolpoliced road to the south, via Persia. We have to go in his company, because the temptation of traveling with the only known Chinese eyewitness of medieval Europe is irresistible. His southward direction was dictated by the motive which inspired him. As a Nestorian Christian on release from his monastery, he wanted to see Jerusalem and visit communities of fellow worshippers, on whose charity he proposed to rely for sustenance. This meant traveling the silk roads, where Nestorian monasteries lay at frequent intervals. In its surviving, heavily edited version, his diary says little about regions already familiar to his readers, until he got to the ilkhanate—the Mongol state centered on Persia. He met the great patriarch of Nestorian Christendom, Mar Denha, at Maragha, in what is now Azerbaijan, the intellectual capital of the western Mongol world. Its library contained four hundred thousand books, and its observatory, newly created, was a famous center of scientific technology and meeting place of scholars: a wellplaced way station on the westbound route of Oriental wisdom. The patriarch prophesied that Rabban Bar Sauma’s pilgrimage would be completed, then did his best to divert him from it, first assigning him as a personal representative tothe entourage of the ilkhan, then tempting him with a promotion that would have demanded his return to China.
Not even the patriarch’s death released Rabban Bar Sauma: on the contrary, its intricate consequences embroiled him deeply in the politics of Persia, for his fellow Chinese, friend, and traveling companion, who became known as Mar Yaballaha, was elected to the patriarch’s throne. Nor could Rabban Bar Sauma accomplish either of his heartfelt desires: to complete his pilgrimage or, if prevented, to retire to a monastery. In 1286 , perhaps as much as ten years after his departure from China, he was selected by the ilkhan to undertake a diplomatic mission to Western Christian kingdoms in order to negotiate an alliance against a common enemy: the Mamluk sultanate of Egypt.
He witnessed an eruption of Mount Etna and a battle in the Angevin-Aragonese war on his way to Rome, where he was accorded a signal honor: reception by the conclave that was in session for a papal election. But while the election was incomplete no serious business could be transacted, and he decided to renew his quest in Paris, where so many crusading initiatives of recent times had been launched. Here, almost for the first time, his account reveals interests beyond his diplomatic responsibilities and his devotional cravings. In Paris he recognized an intellectual powerhouse reminiscent of Maragha, with schools of mathematics, astronomy, medicine, and philosophy as well as theology. Before returning to Persia, he gave communion to the king of England, received the same sacrament at the hands of the new pope, Nicholas IV, on Palm Sunday, 1288 , and felt the ground shake at mass on Holy Thursday when the congregation uttered the great Amen. The copious letters he carried at his return, however, contained no commitment to a Mongol alliance. They merely exhorted the ilkhan to baptism, the Nestorians to reform, and any Catholics at the ilkhan’s court to fidelity.45
Rabban Bar Sauma’s mission showed how wide Eurasia was: the gulf bridged by the Mongol peace was still hard to close in terms of culture. The only language Rabban Bar Sauma had in common with his interpreters was Persian, and it is evident from the mistakes of interpretation he makes in relating the niceties of Catholic practice and Western politics that a great deal got lost in translation. He mistook diplomatic demurrals for substantive assent, and expressions of Christian fellowship for doctrinal agreement. Nevertheless, the fact that he completed the journey at the same time that Marco Polo and other Westerners were doing so in the opposite direction demonstrates the efficacy of the Mongol peace in making Eurasia traversible. Indeed, Rabban Bar Sauma’s text—tattered and torn as it is—remains the most startling expression of the mutual accessibility of the extremities of the landmass at the time. It is hard to resist the conclusion that the revolutionary experiences of Western civilization at the time—the technical progress, the innovations in art, the readjustment of notionsof reality through the eyes of a new kind of science—were owed in part to influences exerted along the routes the Mongols created or policed.
Eventually, the Mongols themselves imported the conventional civilizationof city life into the steppe. Early in the second half of the sixteenth century, Koke Khota, the “Blue City,” took shape as a fixed capital near the present border of Inner and Outer Mongolia. Its founder, Altan Khan, retained some ancestral habits, treating his gout by paddling in the cleft body of a sacrifice victim, but he scattered the slopes above his city with Buddhist monasteries, sent to Peking for improved texts of Buddhist scripture, and commissioned translations on tablets of polished applewood.46
In the history of civilization, however, the steppe was not a crib but a catalyst. The Mongol peace coincided with the most intense period ever in trans-Eurasian communications, and European traditions were rechanneled as a result, or, at least, guided more securely in directions they might have taken anyway. Paper, for instance, was a Chinese invention that had already reached the West through Arab intermediaries; the secret of its manufacture was said to have been revealed to entrepreneurs in Samarkand by Chinese technicians captured in battle at Talas in Ferghana in 751 . But it was only in the late thirteenth century that paper was adopted in Europe as a major contribution to what we would now call information technology. Gunpowder and the blast furnace were among the transmutative sources of apparent magic that first reached Europe from China in the Mongol period. With consequences for the future of the world which can hardly be overestimated, Western science grew more like that of China’s longstanding kao-zheng tradition: more empirical, more reliant on the reality of sense perceptions, more committed to the observation of nature as a prelude to the management of natural forces.47
At the University of Paris, which Rabban Bar Sauma so admired, scholars cultivated a genuinely scientific way of understanding the architecture of the world. The end products were the marvelously comprehensive schemes of knowledge and faith elaborated by the encyclopedists of thirteenth-century Paris, especially in the work of the greatest intellect of the age—one of the greatest of any age—Thomas Aquinas, whose panoptic vision, arrayed in precise categories, reaches out to include everything known by experience or report. Not far from Paris, you can see a vision of this sort in the glass of Chartres, in which the whole cosmos is schematically depicted. It was a measurable cosmos, portrayed by a French artist between the dividers of Christ the geometer, like a ball of fluff, trapped between tweezers.48
Roger Bacon, a professor in Paris in the 1240 s, insisted that scientific observations could help to validate holy writ, that medical experiments could increase knowledge and save life, and that infidels could be cowed and converted by science. He was an idiosyncratic character, marginalized by contemporarieswho were suspicious of his lucubrations with pagan and Muslim books; but his work on optics reflected the confidence of his age in the reality of the objects of perception and the reliability of the forces that bind them to our sight. His image of the wise falconer who learns by experience appealed to the most restless experimenter of the age, the emperor Frederick II, whose contempt for convention made him the “stupefier of the world.” The emperor was an expert on falconry and prided himself on knowing more about it than Aristotle. He was said to have had two men disemboweled to show the varying effects of sleep and exercise on the digestion, and to have brought up children in silence “in order to settle the question whether they would speak Hebrew, which was the first language, or Greek or Arabic or at least the language of their parents; but he labored in vain, for the children all died.”49
Considered from one point of view, the realism increasingly favored in Western painting was a tribute to the enhanced prestige of the senses: to paint what one’s eyes could see was to confer dignity on a subject not previously thought worthy of art. The devotion of the rosary, introduced early in the thirteenth century, encouraged the faithful to imagine sacred mysteries with the vividness of scenes of everyday life, as if witnessed in person. Thus, the science and piety of the age were linked by art. The art the Franciscans commissioned for their churches draws the onlooker into sacred spaces, as if in eyewitness of the lives of Christ and the saints. It stirs the emotions of the devout by unprecedented realism—looking at the world with eyes as unblinking as those of the new scientific thinkers. It enfolds the whole of nature in love: the ravens St. Francis preached to, the creatures, landscapes, sun, and moon whom he called sisters and brothers.
None of this experimentation and imagination put Western science abreast of that of China, where observation and experiment had been continuous in scientific tradition since the first millennium B.C.50The only Chinese word ever used for a Taoist temple means “watchtower”—a platform from which to observe the natural world and launch naturalistic explanations of its phenomena. Taoism has, in Confucian eyes, a reputation for magical mumbo-jumbo, but Taoists can transcend magic by means of their doctrine that nature, to the man who would control her, is like any other beast to be tamed or foe to be dominated: she must be known first. Tao therefore encouraged scientific practices of observation, experiment, and classification.51Frederick II’s antics had been anticipated by the legendary Tsou-hsin, who cut open his cousin to test the claim that the heart of a sage had seven orifices, and when he saw peasants wading in an icy river, ordered their legs to be broken to test the effects of low temperatures on bone marrow.52Inventions that were novel in the West were age-old in China—paper, gunpowder, the compass. In most of the critical technologies that have shaped the world, China has been shown to have been between one and thirteen centuries ahead of the West. The thirteenth century was the begin-ningof a critical period in which many of them were communicated. And the Mongol peace was a vital part of the means.53
So why did other great grasslands play no similar role? Why did crossfertilization across the American prairie or pampa have such modest effects before the nineteenth century? And why was the mutual enrichment of the civilizations at either end of the Eurasian plain never matched in the African Sahel? In America, development was arrested by two unfavorable circumstances: a late start, and the north-south orientation of the prairie, which meant that cultural transmissions had to cross huge climatic barriers. They did happen from time to time, as we shall see, but on a modest scale and with occluded effects. In Africa, we have found, in part, that the political history of the Sahel never favored long-range transmissions of culture; every expanding imperial state in the West was blocked by Bornu or challenged by invaders from the desert, so that no people ever played the plains-wide role of the Mongols in Eurasia or the Sioux in the great American prairie. Paradoxically, for long-range empire-building, the African savanna was too rich by comparison with prairie or steppe: it bred environmentally specific cultures, content with a modicum of territory. States with imperial ambitions expanded along trade routes which crossed the region from north to south and aimed to unite desert edge with forest edge. Expansion within the Sahel, from east to west, was relatively unremunerative. Nevertheless, though it never became an efficient highway of communication between civilizations, the region produced an even more impressive effect: indigenous civilizations more remarkable and more creditable, by the usual standards of civilized life, than in any other comparable environment in the world.