Nomadic Steppe Warfare Research Paper

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The nomadic pastoralists of the Central Asian steppes played a major role in Eurasian warfare from nearly six thousand years ago until the early eighteenth century. Their wars, internal and external, shaped patterns of politics, trade, and cultural exchange throughout the Eurasian world, and they produced some of the most successful and fearsome conquerors world history has known.

The foundation of nomadic military interaction with, and success against, their sedentary neighbors was the geography of the steppes. A vast sea of grass stretching from the northwest frontiers of China to north of the Black Sea, with an extension into modern Hungary, the steppes are too dry for traditional methods of agriculture: rainfall is insufficient and the rivers too unreliable for irrigation. But the grasses of the plains can support vast herds of grazing animals, and these formed the basis for the nomad’s pastoral mode of subsistence. Cattle, sheep, and goats provided meat, milk, skins, and wool for clothing and shelter; animal bones and tendons were used in constructing tents and above all in the manufacture of the composite recurved bow that was the nomads’ main weapon in hunting, herding, and war. One other animal held the key to nomadic efficiency in herding and combat: the horse. Horses were apparently first domesticated in the area north of the Black Sea as long as six thousand years ago; they and the oxen that drew the carts that carried the nomads’ tents and possessions let entire peoples migrate from summer to winter grazing lands and to entirely new lands in response to outside pressures. Horses also gave steppe armies tremendous tactical and strategic mobility.

Mobility and fi repower, wielded by people accustomed to constant travel, camping, occasional short rations, and periodic violent competition with other nomads for the best grazing land—that is, accustomed to constant military campaigning as a lifestyle rather than as an aberration from settled life—gave nomadic peoples significant military potential vis-avis their sedentary agriculturalist neighbors outside the steppes. At the same time, the limitations of pastoralism necessitated at least indirect contact with sedentary populations: nomads needed at least a few agricultural products to supplement their diet. They also desired certain products, most importantly cloth and metal implements, whose fixed capital requirements for production made them difficult for nomadic peoples to produce. Thus nomadic peoples tended to get what they wanted from agricultural societies by trading, raiding, tribute (bribes to deter raids), or conquest. This was the fundamental economic backdrop to steppe nomads’ warfare with people beyond the steppes.

Geography and State Formation

Nomadic warfare was in the first instance intertribal, aimed at other nomads in competition for grazing lands, as mentioned earlier. Because the pastoral way of life supports a far less-dense population than agriculture, individual tribes could rarely muster sufficient manpower to pose a serious threat to sedentary states. Hindered by their meager surplus wealth and scattered population base, steppe peoples rarely generated political formations more complex than individual tribes. The paradoxical result was that nomadic coalitions (and therefore the nomadic military threat) were most likely in close proximity to rich settled states. Trading and small-scale raiding along the border might generate a sufficient flow of prestige goods to a successful steppe leader to allow him to build a larger coalition of tribes through a combination of alliances built on gifts and intimidation of others based on those alliances. This larger coalition’s army could then extract a larger flow of goods from the sedentary state (and could draw attention from sedentary armies, increasing the pressure for defensive cooperation), allowing the coalition to grow, and so on. Large coalitions subsumed, at least for a time, their constituent tribes into chiefdoms and at least once, under the Mongols, into a fully fl edged nomadic state, though such coalition chiefdoms tended to be fragile and to break up in the face of serious reverses or succession crises. Thus warfare and strong war leaders were crucial to state formation on the steppes.

Another aspect of steppe geography tended to concentrate such state formation at the eastern end of the steppe. Here the Mongolian plain abutted the northwest frontier of the Chinese civilization, which from the second century BCE was consistently organized into a rich and periodically aggressive state. In addition, migration of hunter-gatherers from the forests and tundra to the north generated new tribes and pressures more intensely here than farther west. The largest and most powerful nomadic coalitions therefore tended to arise here. Losers (either internally or in conflicts with China) were pushed westward, generating the east-to-west migrations that usually characterized steppe populations and that sometimes became nomadic incursions into settled lands at the outlets of the steppes into Persia and Europe. If the Silk Roads across the steppes connected Eurasia commercially, then the pressures of warfare and state formation on the steppes connected Eurasia militarily.

Nomadic Warfare: Tactics and Strategy

The tactical effectiveness of nomadic warfare was based in the first instance, as noted above, on the combination of mobility and firepower that horses and composite bows gave to steppe peoples. In the hands of a practiced archer, the bow, a short but powerful weapon made from a combination of wood, horn, and sinew glued together and strung against its natural curve, could send light arrows several hundred yards with some accuracy or direct heavier arrows over shorter ranges with dangerous penetrating power. Nomadic horse archers were skilled at harassing enemy formations from a distance, retreating when counterattacks were launched, only to return to the attack when the enemy advance became scattered or disorganized. Feigned fl ights were thus a standard part of the nomadic tactical repertoire. Elite nomadic warriors—tribal nobles and the favored forces of larger coalitions—often wore armor that included some sewn-on metal plates and was heavier than the leather and raw silk protection worn by regular horse-riding archers; the elite forces also wielded lances and even swords. This heavier element in nomadic armies could engage in hand-to-hand combat, delivering a decisive charge against an enemy softened up by archery. Nomadic armies often drew up for battle in a broad, shallow crescent formation, the wings thrown forward with the aim of encircling the enemy flanks. But flexibility was the key nomadic strength in combat, as they used their mobility to create chances to “herd and cull” the formations of sedentary armies using the skills they practiced on mass animal hunts on the steppes.

Still, in the right terrain and under competent leadership, sedentary armies could sometimes defeat nomadic forces in battle, using their often superior weight of armor, weaponry, and numbers to break nomadic lines in hand-to-hand fighting.

What increased the challenge posed by nomadic forces was their operational mobility and above all their strategic trump card: their base in the steppes. The armies of sedentary states, which inevitably included large numbers of infantry, could not hope to keep up with the purely cavalry forces of the steppes: the latter could outrun pursuit and avoid battle when it suited their purposes, raiding and withdrawing before opposition could arrive on the scene. The Mongols deployed this advantage offensively, using their efficient communication system to bring several units to a battlefield from different directions, often inducing panic in their enemies and giving them the impression of being surrounded by “hordes” far larger than they in fact were (the Mongols, like other nomads, often fought outnumbered against sedentary armies). But mobility was most useful defensively, in combination with the logistics of steppe warfare. When threatened by superior forces, nomadic forces could simply withdraw onto the steppes. It was very difficult for a large infantry army to follow them into this terrain because the land could not support armies that lived on grain supplies. Carting supplies in was both prohibitively expensive and subject to severe range restrictions, as the oxen or horses used to pull carts of food also had to be fed. Thus, beyond perhaps a four days’ march from a supply depot, even armies with large supply trains ran out of food—never mind that water supplies were also often problematic. Attempts to push beyond this limitation consistently ended in disaster. For four and a half millennia, consequently, steppe nomads raided and conquered from a base itself immune to conquest except by other nomads. Because nomadic strategy and tactics were so fi rmly based in the nomadic lifestyle, sedentary generals could not adopt them easily. Adoption of nomadic techniques therefore usually required use of nomadic allies by sedentary states, an arrangement that carried its own dangers.

Given this immunity, the military measures sedentary states took against nomadic threats often centered on various forms of fortifications, since the major weakness of most nomadic armies (the Mongols being a partial exception) was, inevitably, siege warfare. Not only were city fortifications built up on the steppe frontier, but some states built larger systems of fortification such as the various walls that came to form the Great Wall of China. These were designed less to keep the nomads out (virtually an impossibility) than to slow them on their advance and return from a raid, thereby allowing a defensive force to bring them to battle. But fortifications were also expensive.

Cycles of Nomadic Military History

The relationship that developed between nomadic peoples and their sedentary neighbors as a result of these military dynamics tended to follow a cyclical pattern. Small-scale raiding and trading resulted in both increasing acculturation of the nomads to the political norms of the sedentary society and increasing political organization on the steppes. Both results tended to facilitate large-scale alliance with or conquest of the sedentary state and temporary union of the nomadic and sedentary worlds. But the economic and cultural incompatibility of the two worlds led to renewed split, and the cycle started over. Overall, the long-term trend was toward growth of the sedentary world at the expense of the nomadic world. This was fundamentally a matter of demography: agriculture supported far more people than pastoralism, and the advantage grew over time. But it was also a matter of technology. Gunpowder weapons, in combination with fortifications, paradoxically both contributed to and helped end the last great age of nomadic conquests.

Broadly, the stages of nomadic history may be outlined as follows. A classical age, from the first appearance of nomads such as the Xiongnu in China and the Scythians in the west through the late second century CE, and the decline of the Parthian Empire in the first decades of the third century CE, established the patterns of interaction between the nomadic and sedentary worlds. Between the third century and the twelfth century, larger nomadic coalitions of Uygurs in the east and Turks in the west dominated the steppes, with peaks of invasion and conquest of sedentary areas in the seventh and eleventh centuries. Then in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, the Mongols under Chinggis (Genghis) Khan (c. 1160–1227) and his successors created the largest land empire in history. Their extraordinary success rested in part on Chinggis Khan’s remarkable ability to reshape the tribal political structure of nearly the entire steppe world to his advantage, creating the basis for a longer-lasting nomadic political structure than hitherto. Still, the Mongol Empire fractured among Chinggis’s grandsons and then drifted apart as the Mongols acculturated to their conquered populations. Finally, with the spread of gunpowder technology from the fifteenth century (a somewhat ironic result, in part, of the trade connections promoted by the Pax Mongolica), there appeared a set of hybrid states and military forces, including the Ottomans, the Mughals, the Muscovites, and the Manchus, who managed to wed nomadic cavalry forces to cannon and musket-wielding infantry. Though initially this combination facilitated the renewed conquest of vast sedentary areas by nomadic-led forces, it also proved to be the combination that allowed the empires thus created to tame, once and for a ll, their own nomadic frontiers. By the early eighteenth century, the remaining steppe nomads, hemmed in by fortifications, guns, and co-opted light cavalry forces of nomadic origin, passed out of the realm of military effectiveness for good.

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