EP27 More Steppe Stories
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to me for any period of time already knows how deeply interested I am in the many and various peoples and tribes who occupy the area that's known as the Eurasian step. Now the Eurasian step is a geographical feature and it's not the same. It changes over the length and breadth of the distances involved because the distances are vast.

stretching all the way from the edges of Central Europe to the borders of China, including places like Manchuria, the northern area of India, northern area of Iran. I mean, it's one of these areas that's been a very important part of human history and that touches a ton of societies that were in Eurasian history, some of the key important places. So they've been involved in human history and important events from the get-go, basically. And if you

Look at some of the names of the peoples involved, the tribes and the tribal confederacies. It's obvious, I mean, to use just one. How about the Mongols or the Turks or the Huns or the Scythians? I mean, the list just goes on and on.

the fascinating aspects of language and ethnicity and all these different things that make up the peoples of the steppe. And of course, if you're a military history interested person or oriented person, you can't help but be fascinated with the unique weapon system of the peoples of the steppe in recorded histories era anyway. I mean, this mixture of a people that grow up riding horses from the time they're toddling around and

and using powerful composite bows at the same time. You create a weapon system that won't be solvable for the people, the enemies of the steppe people, until gunpowder becomes commonplace. If you're interested in those sorts of people and their history, as I am, there are several new books that have come out that are just wonderful additions to your library.

And I can't help but marvel at the differences between the modern day works and the stuff that I grew up with because there's so much new information. I say new, but you know, in the last 40 years, new information out there that fills in all these dark areas that my earlier histories had. And they're big events. I mean, the disintegration of the Soviet Union, the opening of China in the early 70s, the DNA testing that's been happening, all these sorts of things has broadened the informational spectrum.

storehouses that people who work in any number of different disciplines, you know, bioarchaeology is my current favorite in terms of always mentioning, but archaeologists, anthropologists, linguistic people, and of course, you know, historians putting together works that compile all sorts of information from all sorts of sources that give us a much more nuanced and comprehensive view of all these peoples. One of the books that's recently come out

is by a Tulane professor who's an expert on this subject named Kenneth W. Harle. It's called Empires of the Steps, A History of the Nomadic Tribes Who Shaped Civilization.

He is a noted expert on the subject. The book is one of those that when you read it, even if you're interested and have read a lot about this subject, you're going to marvel at his ability to dredge up even things like personal names of some of these early leaders of some of these steppe confederacies, things that were only considered practical.

well, practically legendary when I was a kid, or perhaps even fragmentary type stuff. They have much more information and, of course, the DNA evidence and things like isotope evidence that's coming out now fleshes things out even further. We discussed this with Professor Harl recently, and the interview about Empires of the Steps, well, happens right now.

I have been reading books about the people of the step since the 1970s. I am absolutely overwhelmed by the comprehensiveness of your work. I mean, the number, the number of books that I have that key where everything seems to be in darkness in most of the, you know, like you'll have little data points from here and there. And yet you've got all this information that, that sort of fills in the blanks from all those years. How,

Talk to me about some of the changes in the study and writing about the history of the people of the steppe over the last three, four, five decades in terms of what sources you've been able to consult and how you've been weaving this stuff into a more three-dimensional, comprehensive kind of tale. Well, there's two things going on. One is the world of scholarship, and then is my own experience in teaching a wide range of courses.

First, in terms of the world of scholarship, there's been important finds made in archaeology above all. You have a lot of books concentrating on the Silk Road and the products that were exchanged. Often these are restricted in time, you know, from a certain date to another date. You also have a lot of important monographic studies, especially on the Mongol Khans, which have been well studied by specialist historians.

who read the Mongol language and also understand the Chinese text. And all of these advances have been significant and

The problem is it's such a vast area and it covers such a long time that no one can claim to be an expert in any one particular field. I'm very much at home on the western end of it, or if I'm dealing with Turks, because I know Turkish. On the other hand, there are people who stay on the eastern steppes with China and the Mongols.

And what I attempted to do was what I do in my classes, which is to create a sweeping narrative to understand how events unfolded.

And that required me to bring to bear all sorts of training that I had gained, especially as a classical historian, trained in Greek and Latin and comparative Indo-European linguistics, and my understanding of history, and drawing upon the incredible work that's been done in the last, I would say, four decades,

Really, our knowledge of these people advanced immensely. You think of the Tarim Basin mummies that were discovered and have been analyzed that proved apparently Indo-Europeans had occupied this area at a very early time, the Tarim Basin, which is now in western China. And putting this information together was a real challenge. I fortunately had the time.

I was consigned to my house because of the pandemic. And I really wrote this book on a sabbatical leave where COVID-19 was raging across the United States. And I kept myself occupied putting all of my notes and thoughts together, which I've been looking at for a long time. And so that's what's come together. All of this

very, very significant research done by different scholars. I think of the work done on the Kushans. There was a very important inscription discovered in Afghanistan that revealed the descent of the Kushan kings and clarified the genealogy. There's been studies on ancient coins that have also clarified who issued these coins and how are they connected with steppe peoples.

So it's a variety of sources, and they keep changing and adding, and I'm sure in the future there will be new discoveries. Some may vitiate some of my points, but I think the overall understanding is sound.

and that the work at least conveys the sweep of the great events that have occurred on the steppes since earliest times, when the first people domesticated and herded animals, domesticated the horse, and developed this mobile way of life.

OK, so this is your book covers basically from prehistory to almost the Renaissance. And we have an audience that will span the entire spectrum of people who know nothing about this subject to people who are pretty well versed about at least some of it. So maybe we start at the beginning, a sort of a touchstone point that we can all relate to.

geography and environment here, right? We have a part of the world in Eurasia that touches China on one side, the north of India, the north of Persia, the east of what we would consider to be the central European areas. Talk to me a little bit about this area.

because I always think about the geography and the environment as creating the conditions for the rise of this type of lifestyle. And I'm sure it's an idiotic thing to say, but I mean, I can see almost similarities to the American Great Plains sometimes. And you see the same sorts of sort of the way that they live in certain respects being similar. Talk to me a little bit about, I mean, if you're writing a book called The Empire of the Steps and you're talking to people who don't know anything about this, explain to us what the steps are.

Well, actually, you made a good analogy about the Great Plains Indians, how when horses escaped from the Spanish sometime in the 1680s, I believe, and you had these Mustangs get out on the grasslands of the Great Prairies.

These horses could live on the grasslands, and then Indians learned to domesticate them first as a food source and then to ride them. And it completely changed the culture and political landscape of the Great Prairie, which

Initially, many European Americans simply thought it was the Great American Desert. And this happened at an early date on the western end of that Eurasian steppe you just noted, which really ends in Hungary on what's called the Pannonian Plain, stretches across southern Russia and Ukraine, and stretches all the way to Mongolia and to the foothills of Manchuria.

Now, it varies in different parts. I divided it for convenience into three major zones. One would be the western steppes, that

Usually the Volga River or the Ural River is taken as the boundary. The other are the great central steppes, more or less equivalent to Kazakhstan today, which is an immense area. It's almost as large as Western Europe. And then the eastern steppes, which are better known to many of your listeners, which would be the Mongolian grasslands, bounded in the south by the Gobi Desert and beyond that, the great rivers of China.

On all of this land, it was sometime between, let's say, 4000 and 3000 BC, that people dwelling on the steppes learned that they could exploit the grasslands to sustain great herds of animals, sheep, goat, cattle. The domestication of the horse proved decisive because that became the beast of burden

It could be a source of winter meat if necessary, and it also became the prime animal used in war.

And that developed first on the Western steppes among Indo-European speakers. These would be people speaking a language, it's usually abbreviated PIE by linguists, meaning Proto-Indo-European. And we really don't know the language, it was never written down. It's been reconstructed from the daughter languages based on predictable rules of grammar, pronunciation, and euphony.

And this is the mother tongue of many of the languages from Ireland to India. And the spreading of these languages was a result of the success of these nomadic peoples on the western steppes and harnessing grass as a way of sustaining themselves.

Now, there always was scattered agriculture in some of the river valleys. We know that from reports by Herodotus talking about the Scythians. The Chinese make reference to some farming going on also on the steppes.

But primarily, it was the products of their animals. It would be skins, furs, dairy products, meat, which was most valuable and which sustained them and also provided the goods to exchange with sedentary civilizations on the edge of those steppes. It's a vast region.

and it's bound to the north by the taiga, the Siberian forest zones, beyond the tundra, the frozen area. To the south, you'll encounter various deserts. You think of the Kizilkoum and the Karakoum in the central steppes, or the Gobi on the eastern steppes. And so the people of the steppes lived in this narrow band. It's a land subject to incredible extremes of temperature.

And Papal Envoy mentioned that the only rest he could get in the shade as he was traveling to the Mongol court in the 13th century was to sleep in the midday underneath his cart, his ox-drawn cart. And at first he cursed having opted for a cart over riding and then came to appreciate that cart when he realized there's no shade in the high summer and the temperature can get absolutely brutal.

And then in the winter you have the same extremes, and we have reports of how the nomads were able to survive in winter, both from recent reports of people who've lived among them, as well as the report of Ibn Fadlan, very well known for his account of the Vikings on the Volga. But he was really sent there to parley with a nomadic ruler of the Volga Bulgars, who had recently converted to Islam, and on his way

He is hosted in the winter by these Oskar's Turks who are huddled together in their mobile home and tents. And he remarks about the hospitality, the months of really...

just surviving the brutal cold and how hospitality and one's word and transactions is all important among these groups in order for them to survive. So it breeds a population that can endure great extremes. No weaklings survive in this environment. All adult males who are free are both hunters and warriors.

And once they've domesticated the horse, starting from about 2000 BC on, they innovate first with the light chariot. And then later in the early Iron Age, let's say about a thousand years later, the mounted warrior. And in both instances, whether they're using chariots or they're mounted on horses, they have this composite bow that makes them absolutely formidable foes.

So the landscape, the great distances, the harsh climate, the constant need to look for forage, grasslands for their animals, water, and the need to trade with sedentary civilizations to obtain goods that they themselves cannot produce, keeps them on the move. And it makes them extremely adaptable.

And one aspect I hope the book conveys is that these people are extremely able and clever and learn rapidly what is necessary to survive.

And it's really wrong to simply think of them as barbarians who don't live in cities and don't write great books and don't eat bread, as the ancient people in the Near East would say, that they're just wild men. That's a misrepresentation. Well, OK, so it's worth pointing out if people want to look

at where cavalry begins and then spreads outward from like a drop in the water. You know, you drop a pebble in the water and you see the surrounding ripples. I mean, you can see the spread of cavalry, as you said, starting with cavalry that's hooked up to chariots and carts.

and then eventually you get riders. And you can see it spread to places like Assyria. I mean, you can see China go from having foot nomadic peoples in the western areas, what the Rung and the Di and people like that, all of a sudden become mounted. And it's an entirely new ballgame for them security wise once that happens. So let's talk about this, because as a

As a fan of military history, I'm always intrigued by the fact that once you combine the horse and the composite bow that you just mentioned, you have a weapon system, especially when you hook it to people who grow up with it, as opposed to taking some Byzantine peasant and training them as a mounted archer. It's very different when you take a Hunnic kid who's been on a horse since three years old, shooting at rats and mice as a little child,

Once you combine that weapon system, you have something that isn't going to be made obsolete until almost the Napoleonic era. That's hard to get your mind around when weapon systems go obsolete as quickly as they do today. Talk to us a little bit about, I mean, even Comanche warriors are adopting the same system. What makes that such a difficult to deal with, such a formidable weapon system, the bow and the horse?

Well, first, the horse gives mobility, and most of these, as you should also note, most of these warriors have several mounts, and they can cover great distances rapidly. The Mongol army can ride three times faster than any of its opponents with components of infantry and cavalry.

And that is they can switch from horse to horse. They have fresh mounts always with them. These horses are also extremely sturdy. They can forage on the steps and even forage under the snow. And so when the Mongols invade Europe in 1242, I mean, Batu catches the Europeans by surprise. They're still in winter quarters, more or less. It isn't quite yet spring, and yet the Mongols can move around rapidly.

So strategically they have great mobility, and this strikes terror in the hearts of their foes. They never are able to get an accurate count of how many there are. Usually these forces are much smaller than literary sources report.

You know, the literary sources will talk of hundreds of thousands. You're probably dealing with an army of 30,000, maybe 50,000. It's an enormous army. And the full Mongol levy in the time of Genghis Khan at his death in 1227 was probably somewhere around 130,000 to 150,000, of whom many of them were Turks rather than actually Mongols. Tactically,

This weapon is ideal for attacking mixed formations of infantry and cavalry that depend on a tactic of bringing the enemy to close combat.

where you can use edge weapons to overcome them, whether it's the Roman gladius, whether it's a pike, whether it's a halberd in the Middle Ages. The shock action is what's supposed to decide the battle, but the nomads don't play fair. They will attack these formations, raining arrows into these forces,

usually injuring the horses of their foe, maddening the infantry to get so angry that they'll break ranks and try to pursue. And what they do is refuse to close in close quarters and draw their foes out in an ill-advised counterattack. And as they scatter, they'll then turn upon them and ambush them, or they have the great, it's called the Scythian shot in...

Sorry, phone call. A Scythian shot in Greek sources in which the warrior can turn behind with his composite bow and still shoot at a pursuing foe.

Battle after battle is lost as a result of the use of these tactics by the armies of sedentary civilizations. The most famous one is the Battle of Manzikirk in 1071, where the Seljuk Turks manage to break the discipline of the Byzantine army, and it simply panics, and it then becomes a massacre, where they attack and destroy the scattered and panicked forces.

So to defeat such an army requires immense coordination between cavalry and infantry. We have a number of manuals that talk about that. The earliest one in the West is Aryan's battle tactics against the Alans, which is a Sirmatian tribe that burst into Asia Minor around 135 AD, and he has had direct experience in

positioning his infantry, his cavalry supports, and maintaining discipline. The same tactics are advised by a Byzantine manual of the 6th century AD and almost a contemporary manual in China. Usually your best option, and the Tang emperors, the early Tang emperors of China understood this, is to hire nomadic warriors to do the fighting for you.

and at least have some kind of control on some of the inner barbarians, as the Chinese would call them. Those would be the tribes dwelling along the Great Wall in your immediate vicinity. They've become accustomed to Chinese ways to some extent, but they still retain the traditions of the steppes. And you hire them as your warriors because what better option do you have? As you mentioned at the start of that talk,

To ride horses and to use a bow this effectively is a lifetime experience. And you just don't recruit peasants and arm them with bows and try to force them to ride horses and get the kind of results you want. That's just a fact.

China's also hamstrung by the fact that they could never breed effective horses in China proper because of the soil. It doesn't have the minerals necessary for strong bows. And so even if they try to mount Chinese warriors, they're dependent on importing the horses from the nomadic tribes.

And that's a big point in all of these treaties, where silk is paid out to the most prominent nomadic confederacy, whether he's called a Khan or or Chan Yu, whatever his title. And in return, the Chinese emperor expects thousands of horses for his army.

I'm fascinated with both the physics and the human morale side of battle, because when you talked about the Scythian shot or the Parthian shot and the fact and the feigned flight, as it's called for the audience out there, the idea that you can pretend to be fleeing and some of the enemy may pursue you and that breaks up their formation, making them vulnerable. I'm always amazed how many people should know better, right?

whether it's the Byzantine manuals, the Chinese manuals, or even when one step tribe is fighting another. And they're very aware of the feigned flight tactic. And yet somehow they can be encouraged to pursue anyway. I mean, I remember reading about the Mangadai that the Mongols had, which were supposed to encourage something. And they were, I remember somebody, a teacher telling me that they were, they were even recruiting people that might even be good actors for,

Right. To really be able to say, no, no, no, this isn't a trick. We really are fleeing. We really are scared of you. So there's a physics or a morale thing involved where even when you know better, you get suckered into some of these things. Sometimes I'm also interested in maybe you can explain this to me.

I remember reading the early accounts of the Huns' appearance in Europe and the Mongols describing them as so ungodly, ugly, alien-like, and all these kinds of things. And I remember in the 1970s as a kid thinking that this is just a Roman...

of encountering a person from a very different ethnicity that they're not used to. But now we know, and the skulls have been found, and you mention it in your book about things like the head binding and all those sorts of things that would have created something that to a Roman may have looked, well, to somebody today, go look at the skulls, may have looked extremely unnatural. Can you talk a little about what these people may have looked like and why? Yeah.

Well, you're drawing on the account of Ammianus Marcellinus, who's the first Roman to report about the Huns. And they would have arrived on the eastern edge of the western steppes about 370 A.D. And they came crashing into the Goths, who were Germanic people living on the Russian steppes, the South Russian steppes. And the Romans had had contact with the Goths for over two centuries. In fact, they had treaties with the Goths.

Many of them were recruited into patrolling this area for the benefit of Rome and received subsidies. Amiens claims that they're not even humans. They look like stumps. They are comparatively short. They have the deformed head and scars. They ride around on their horses. They're noted for taking head taking, which is a common phenomenon on the steppes, either taking heads or scalps, same as reported the Scythians.

And these people would have been of Eastern Asian origin. They would not be Europode, as you'd say. And they spoke what was probably an agglutin of language. We're not exactly sure how to classify it because the words we have in the Hun language are mostly proper names.

And they very quickly subjected a wide variety of people. So there's lots of Iranian and Germanic names and objects that are associated with them. But they were seen as unusually foreign.

and unusually ferocious. They made war violently. They were able to defeat the Goths and drive many of them into the Roman Empire. And it's the Hun migration into Central Europe that ultimately drives many of the Germanic tribes into the Roman Empire.

And then as a result of their depredations and attacks on the Eastern Empire and their great invasion of Western Europe in 451 and 452, they tipped the balance to the Germanic tribes who have settled within the Roman Empire as the future of Europe. And they play a very decisive role that way. But in terms of battle, you can go back and read John Keegan's book on Face of Battle, which really was a groundbreaking work in military history. I'm sure many of your

Listeners are familiar with that work. And one of the irresistible impulses is to see the enemy turn his back and flee. That is generally when the greatest number of casualties are suffered by the defeated, that they are pursued. And the nomads, the

do all these scattered attacks, and then show their backs and flee. And it's very hard to keep soldiers in line when they see that. Even well-trained soldiers have the tendency to probably, now's our chance to get back at them. You know, they've been shooting these arrows at us all day. It hasn't been a good Army day. I've been forced to stay in the same place in the hot sun. Now they're fleeing. Well, let's go get those guys.

And that would especially be true of the supporting cavalry that would probably go after them and gallop. And they're usually more heavily armored, not as nimble as the nomadic warriors. And they start to break up in formation. And this is just the ideal time to carry out an ambush. You'll have some of your fellow soldiers.

Warriors waiting in a concealed position to take them in flank. The ones fleeing will suddenly turn around and start launching their arrows, and some of them will close for hand-to-hand combat as scattered battles, you know, individual combat in which these warriors excel.

So, maintaining that discipline is very difficult, and it comes through in manual after manual in dealing with these foes. And as late as, say, oh gosh, and you're right, Napoleonic Wars, I'm thinking of the wars between the armies of the Holy Roman Emperor, the Habsburg Emperor, and the Ottomans. The Ottomans deploying many what we would call Tartars, Tatars, from South Russia as allies,

And Prince Eugene of Savoy, you know, keep strict formations. Don't break up when they pull this stunt. And that's the psychology of the heat of battle, you know, checking your impulses from throwing away a victory or at least a strategic draw. And generally, that's usually the best an army of a sedentary civilization can really achieve. All these people would be a strategic draw.

And the best way to deal with them, at least on the eastern steps, would be the Chinese would wage winter campaigns and try to catch the campsites in their winter grounds and capture horses, destroy horses, destroy the mobile homes, the yurt, and take many prisoners. And you drew an analogy to the Plains Indians in North America.

You know, you think of Faraday's army, you know, winter campaigns. And I was a sucker for the Westerns growing up. You know, I was born in 1951, so...

I'm a big fan of the searchers. And there's that incident where, you know, John Wayne sees the U.S. Cavalry. That was just what I was thinking of. Custer the Little Bighorn. Yeah. Attacked a Comanche camp in the winter, you know, following the strategy that Sheridan and Sherman had framed. It's not too different.

Well, now let's talk a little bit about ethnicity, because to me, that's one of the more surprising things about the entire step and also the makeup of some of these tribes. I remember you mentioned the Terran mummies, but I remember reading very early accounts of the Turks. And we think of the Turks as looking like the people in Turkey today, although that's a wide variety of people, obviously, too. But the early accounts would have green-eyed Turks with red hair. I mean, stuff that just doesn't jibe with our stereotypical views of

today. You talked about the Yuzian tribes on the western area of China looking and speaking much more Indo-European languages. Genghis Khan, maybe red hair and gray eyes. Talk to me a little about the fact that, you know, you really and the fact that these tribes would accept defeated enemies into their midst. And it's an ethnic

estuary, isn't it? Yeah. The big test ultimately becomes language. How do you express yourself? Language is an interpretation of the world, and every language represents a slightly different interpretation, and that's why I always urge my students to learn more languages. Your sense of humor changes, the way you name objects, and

And my wife is Turkish, and believe me, a bilingual marriage is one that is constantly changing, constantly learning. And so you speak of the Turks today in the Republic of Turkey, or Turkiye, as they want to be called now, which is the Turkish name for the land. And you're looking at a minority of nomadic peoples who had embraced Islam, who arrived in the

The rest is that of the people who were originally there, as well as Balkan, Russian, Middle Eastern, all sorts of people who had moved into that area under the Ottoman Empire.

And the same is true on the steppes, and that is the nomads would learn languages as necessary. The rapid expansion of the Turkish speakers in the early Middle Ages, which really to me marks the beginning of the Middle Ages on the steppes, the expansion by Bumin and the Gurt Turks starting in 550 AD.

across the central and eastern steppes when they overthrew their overlords. Many of the people on the steppes there would have been speaking Iranian, Tarkarian, different types of Indo-European languages, but they had had long contact with Turkish tribes because there aren't any neat boundary lines.

that you have in a modern state. They move to make use of the land, and a tribe will be in a certain area, another tribe shows up, which speaks a different language, and either they fight each other or they end up coming to some sort of agreement in which one tribe has grazing rights and lets it to use the same water source. There's celebrations and invariably marital

ties are cemented. So these people are constantly interacting with each other and changing.

And what happens is many of the people who spoke Iranian languages end up speaking Turkish. That's why when you go out to western China in what the locals want to call Uyghurstan, where the Uyghurs are today, you'll find many Uyghurs with fair hair and green eyes, and they're probably descended ultimately from Tarkarian ancestors. Others will show traits that they came from the Middle East.

Others will show traits that they came from East Asia, but they all speak Uyghur Turkish itself, a mixture of several other languages. But that's what identifies them.

And then as these tribes embrace one of the monotheistic creeds, such as Islam, or they embrace Buddhism, that becomes another way of defining who they are, their religious views, and how they reconcile that religion with their traditional romantic beliefs and spirits and shamans. So that...

That's going on constantly. And the notion of all the Huns looking like what Ammianus said or some of these depictions of the Huns from the 19th century where they're magnified as the yellow peril from the east destroying Roman civilization, you know, these are overdrawn. The Hun armies of Attila comprise many Iranian speakers and Germanic speakers and

And Attila himself is remembered as a great king in Norse and Germanic legend. He lives on as one of the great lords who had a court of great warriors. And in the German tradition, if you ever read the German epic, the Nibelungelied, he's picked it quite favorably, actually. So you are correct. There's a constant movement and intermixture going on.

And likewise with the sedentary civilizations. Any great lord, like Modu Chanyu, who in the second century BC established the Confederacy of the Shuangnu, will negotiate with the Han emperor in order to get Chinese brides for himself and for his leading supporters, because that elevates him in the status of his subjects. And that's just...

They're prone to out marrying like that.

One of the things I found very valuable in the book was you being able to put to rest a bunch of the questions that we've often had studying the steppe people forever. For example, you just mentioned both Attila and the Zhuang Nu and the idea of whether or not the Huns and the Zhuang Nu were the same people. In your book, you took the firm belief that new information has shown that they were not. Am I correct in saying that?

Yeah, I think at most they're familiar with the term. Hunna is apparently how the Chinese pronounce the Shuangnu. And, um,

and Chinese scholars, sinologists, I guess you would call them, historians of China. It was a fearful term that was adopted by these people. At most, they were a vassal tribe or a distant subject of the Shuangnu, but there's no direct connection. And the review of the archaeological evidence

in the period of Attila, that is the Hun hegemony in Europe, of jewelry, pottery styles, and all, really shows no connections to the earlier material you would find in East Asia. Now, there are arguments that have been made that the Huns were heirs to some kind of step imperial administration. That's made by one scholar in particular, but I just don't see it. What I do see is

is that the Huns in Europe are familiar with exchanges with sedentary civilizations, and they're just quick studies. The Shuang Nu learned that writing was very valuable. Well, so did the Huns as soon as they came into contact with the Roman Empire. Atoa had both Greek and Roman secretaries who could draft letters and treaties and any kind of document he would want.

And we don't know what languages Attila spoke besides the Hun language. He may well have known a fair amount of Latin and some kind of East dramatic dialect to talk to some of his leading vassals.

One of his secretaries, Orestes, ends up going back into imperial service after Attila dies and puts his son on the throne as the last Western emperor, Romulus Augustus. When the Hun empire fragmented, Orestes, with a whole bunch of probably unemployed warriors of Attila, offers himself to the Western court

and eventually ends up putting his son on the throne. And it goes to show how easily people from sedentary civilizations can move into the nomadic world and then move back. There's a constant movement that way. Genghis Khan won the support of many people who are known as Khitans in North China, who had ruled there and hated the then ruling North Chinese dynasty, and they went over to the Mongols. Kublai Khan literally

built a Chinese army and navy to conquer the Song. And you find this constant cooperation that the nomads are able to engage different peoples who have skills from the sedentary civilizations.

Attila has it. Your interest in military history? Attila can take cities with engineers. These are clearly Romans in the service of Attila. Genghis Khan had his Chinese engineering corps, which Kublai Khan expanded by adding Iranians and Arabs, compliments of his brother, Hulago, who sent some of the best men to him.

So there is a constant need for them to innovate. And especially in the art of war, they're extremely receptive to innovations.

Let me let me let me change gears here. So there's a wonderful line that I've always liked that history is just one damn thing after another. And if you look at the entire scope of your book and the subject matter from from early times to to the Renaissance, if you if you wanted to, you could almost classify that as one thing.

eruption of step people after another. And I'm kind of interested in the idea that there always seems to be another more ferocious, more dangerous, more tough, more energetic, more resourceful tribe, always waiting in the wings. You know, the Magyars get to deal with the Pechenegs. I mean, there's always somebody on there. So can you explain the maybe the rationale is not the right word, but why?

But what's going on there that there's always got to be another tribe looking to supplant the one that's just settled down and to use the old Chinese word for it, and just been cooked, you know, in terms of a civilizational sense? Well, what happens is those that move off the steps into the settled zones, in many instances, they become assimilators.

and they'll embrace the dominant culture, although sometimes they will retain their language as the Turks did, and as the Hungarians did. You know, Hungarians return, you know, retain a language that's not related to the other European languages. It's an Uyghur language that is remotely related to Turkish and Mongolian. And new people fill in behind, and you have to realize that it doesn't take much for these

these groups to become overcrowded and for the resources to become scarce. Just, you know, a couple of bad summers and you are desperate to move on. And many of these migrations take the form of individual groups, small groups of 20, 50 moving on their own, looking for water, looking for grass, and then sending news back to their relatives. Oh, come west or go east or go southeast. You'll find better pastures.

And what happens is they'll run into the occupants of the area and some kind of fighting is going to ensue. And that means they're constantly struggling around themselves to make sure they have sufficient water and grass for their animals, they have access to trade with the sedentary civilizations, and the competition is fierce.

And if you don't win a battle, the consequences are pretty severe in many instances. They'll massacre the adult males. They might keep some of the specialists, you know, good craftsmen and some of the women. But the defeated really get killed because the resources are so limited. And

So there's a constant movement because no sedentary civilization can control this area. The only individual who ever managed to rule large sections of the steppe was the Tang Emperor Taizong in the 7th century. He was able to overthrow the Turkish Khanate.

and controlled the Eastern and Western Turks in his lifetime, but his successors immediately lost control. And one of the reasons was that he was accepted by many of the Turks as a great warrior in his own right, and in many ways preferred the martial life of the steppes to his Mandarin Confucian bureaucrats.

But he's an exception. And as you mentioned, it's only when you have effective firearms, not just artillery, but handheld firearms, that the Russians on one end and the Chinese on the other move in to essentially divide control of the steppes and stop this movement and prevent this

cycle of tribes moving around and jostling. And all of a sudden, one group realizes for us to be more effective, we have to build up a more successful confederation. And so first you get the Shuang Nu, then you get the Ruan Khans, and then you get the Turks, and then you get the Uyghurs.

Each time a confederacy learning from its predecessors and the necessity to be able to feed its population and have access to the goods of the sedentary civilization. So they do. They learn. They get better. And the best of all are the Mongols. And

Even by the standards of the 13th century, the Mongols wage war fiercely on a massive scale of massacre in order to break the will of their opponents. And Chinese, Muslim, Western Christian, Russian sources all report atrocities which shocks them. And these are people who do not wage war among themselves, according to the Geneva Convention. I mean, they're pretty brutal themselves.

But the Mongols have taken this warfare on the steps and refined it to a very high degree of destruction. And some would argue that Genghis Khan and his son and grandsons were waging war almost on a genocidal level in some instances.

Well, let's talk about that a minute, because that was always the prevailing portrayal of the Mongols, right? The Russians have never ceased explaining how horrible it was. But there were some books that came out a little while back that make Genghis Khan sound like

you know, well, you know the old line about the trade-offs of empire, right? On one hand, you have the trade-offs on empire. On the other hand, you have the Romans create a wasteland and call it peace. I, I,

So you fall plainly on the side that the accounts of the Mongols creating towers of skulls and rivers of fats and all those things are real. And that this, you know, I remember having a conversation with somebody where they were talking about how the Mongols were so religiously tolerant of.

And I said, but yeah, but they can do anything they want to you, right? So it's like saying they can take your daughter for a slave, but they're religiously tolerant. So explain to me a little, if you can, I guess what I'm saying is you're buying the historical portrayal of the Mongols and steppe peoples. Well, let's talk about ancient warfare the same way. But this is brutality on, like you said, practically a genocidal scale. Yeah, and that is because...

several factors. In the Mongols, once you go to war, all bets are off. If a city resists and then surrenders or falls, the conqueror has complete control of it and can do what he wishes.

And you'll have to negotiate a surrender almost immediately before you can resist. And one of the reasons for the terror is to drive people in the countryside into the city, spreading rumors of the massive Mongol army approaching and the dangers you're in, in the hope that the city will just surrender. Another aspect is that warfare is personal.

when close members of Genghis Khan's family are killed in battle, he takes that personally. It's a code of honor, and the entire city or area will be devastated to propitiate the spirit of that lost relative. That's a...

That's an awful price to pay. But you have to remember, they are still operating in very much a heroic martial ethos in which one's honor is at stake. And killing your close family members is an insult to your honor. And they will pay the price. Rebellion, any kind of rebellion, is treated incredibly harshly.

And you see that in the cities of Iran and Transoxiana. Transoxiana would be today essentially Uzbekistan. And the Mongols were just brutally punished cities that have rebelled, especially if they've killed members of the Mongol garrison or envoys, whatever the case will be.

So there no doubt is exaggeration. There's all these apocalyptic terms that are used. You've got Matthew Parrish in England coining the name Tartars for the Mongols, meaning they come from Tartarus, the classical underworld, that is hell, and they're the devil's horsemen.

But the use of massacres and brutal reprisals is part and parcel of the way the Mongols waved war.

And you just can't dismiss all these accounts. There's too many of them from different sources. And we know what the conditions are like on the steppes. And we know what warfare was even like among the tribes. I mean, tribes that rebelled against, he was then known as Temujin before he took the title Genghis Khan, were just as brutally put down.

You know, one tribe, all the men taller than the great wheel of a mobile home is just executed in reprisal for the rebellion, which saw the death of one of his relatives. So, yeah, I do believe.

that they wage war very violently. The same reports are given of Attila, especially in northern Italy and Gaul. That would be in his campaigns of 451 and 452. And this is how war is waged. It's the losers lose. And unless you submit immediately, the conqueror has the right to met out whatever punishment he wants.

Well, and there's a pragmatic side to that, too. I mean, if you want to look at it that way, if you have to level one city like Baghdad, the next time you ask another city to to surrender, the the odds get better. And we should also point out that there's...

it's not exactly pleasant to have the Crusaders during the crusade sack your city. Uh, uh, it's never been wonderful step people or settled people. And what's the old line. If you, if you, if you make the enemy conduct a siege, then they'll going to sack your city and that's going to be awful whether you're step tribe or not. Um, so, so let's talk a little bit then about, um,

About some of these people, like, I'm very interested because we didn't have this information when I was growing up. I mean, we had Attila. We had Genghis Khan. We didn't have some of these earlier leaders that you go into great depth upon. Some of these guys who were the first of the empire builders, the Shang-Nu leaders and what not. Can you talk a little bit about one of those great leaders? Well, Mono Changyu is largely known from accounts of the Chinese historians.

And he's the first step conqueror we know by name at the end of the third, beginning of the second century BC. And he essentially overthrew his father by creating a bodyguard of excellent archers and then turning him on his father, which was supposed to be a practice and seizing power.

And he builds a confederation in which he drives some of the tribes west, notably Tarkarian speakers become the future Kushans of Central Asia and Northern India.

and he subjects the other tribes, and his confederation lasts an extremely long time. It's able to cut treaties with the early Han emperors, but it's really the Emperor Wu Di who decides to wage war against the Shuangnu, and this will consume the resources of the Han Empire for the next two centuries. Eventually they break up the confederation,

They break into a northern and southern confederation at the end of the first century BC. Some of the tribes are hired into Chinese service, but ultimately it's almost self-defeating.

because these tribes take over the monopoly of defending the northern frontiers, the tribes close to the Chinese border, and eventually they go into business for themselves. And the parallel between that and my more detailed study of the Roman Empire are very real. The Romans hired the Germans to patrol their frontiers, and the problem is they get a monopoly on armed force, and then they go into the empire and decide to take areas for their own.

chased by the Huns, but nonetheless they're in business for themselves.

So the other are the brothers who turned the Seljuk Turks into a great power, particularly Tuval Bay, who in 1055 enters Baghdad and restores the power of the Sunni caliphate. But it took him 25 years of fighting out on the eastern steppes and in Transoxiana and eastern Iran to build up that position.

And then his nephew, Alp Arslan, is the one who will win the Battle of Manzikirk and move the Turks into Asia Minor. The Turks, those two rulers, really changed the political landscape and eventually the ethnic and linguistic landscape of the Near East. And you can still see their results today. Asia Minor is the heartland of the Turkish Republic.

At the time they arrived, it was the heartland of a Christian, Greek-speaking Byzantine empire. This is a major change. And they also triggered the crusade by disrupting the pilgrimage route.

Bumin, who overthrew his overlords and is the first Turkish ruler we know by name, he and his brother spread the Turkish power across Eurasia very rapidly in the early 6th century AD, mid-6th century AD. And while they only ruled for a couple of years, he's dead by 552, the

Ethnic transformation of the steppes endures to this day. Except for Kyrgyzstan, all of those Central Asian republics speak a Turkish language. In Eastern Turkish language, most of them, which for a modern Turk in the Turkish Republic, they can understand basically, but the languages have diverged. So...

It was wonderful to do this book. And in each chapter, I tried to zero in on figures that we knew something about who would be remarkable figures to engage the reader because ultimately history is about people.

And we learn from history because we're dealing with other humans and how they deal with crises and different types of situations, what their beliefs are. And I always try to put myself in the position of those people and try to see the world through their eyes. That's my job as a historian. And then interpret what does it mean, what's the importance of this for the present generation and hopefully the future generation.

Because it's the only record we have, the past. The present is just a point in time. In the future, well, we don't know what the future is. But by looking to the past, we might be able to gain some lessons in order to deal with the future. And in that sense, I'm very much a classical historian. History has a didactic purpose. I know a lot of my colleagues would jump on me for saying that. But there is a reason to study it.

And just like you, at an early age, I read about the Mongols and I read about Atul and the Hun, and I was fascinated with the fact that you have all of these different tribes on the Eurasian steppes who keep reappearing.

For Europeans of the Middle Ages, it's like, okay, it's now the 11th century. Who's the new nomadic conqueror du jour? It's now the 12th century. Who's replaced them? Oh, it's now the Cumans. I'm being a bit facetious, but that was my initial reaction as a boy growing up reading about all

Yeah, springing from the concept of there being a womb of nations somewhere that just spit these people out one after another. You know, I remember reading a line that I've never forgotten that was talking about the Mongol conquest and giving a sense of its breadth. And they said the Mongols were fighting the Teutonic Knights in the West and the Japanese in the East, both of whom were unaware of the other's existence.

They also invaded Chava, by the way.

that the nomads of the Eurasian steppe provide the connective tissue that connect parts of the world that didn't even... I mean, the Byzantines may know that there's a China somewhere and vice versa, but they don't have any direct connection. It's these cultures of the steppe

through the Silk Road, through trade, through the spread of ideas that are the ones that create these both intellectual, cultural, and actual physical connections between these cultures that don't have direct connections. Can you talk a little about that? Yeah, and there's been some very good books by popular historians, especially on, what's his name, Jack Weatherfield, on the Mongols and how

The Pax Mongolic, to coin a term from Pax Romana, in the 13th century made possible all sorts of trade and exchange of ideas and technology and knowledge that made the modern world possible.

And without the spread of gunpowder, you wouldn't have had the military revolutions you see in Europe and the Middle East in the 15th and 16th centuries, which transformed the world. Scientific knowledge, different types of plants, geography, astronomy and astrology, all of this was exchanged among the four great ulus, that is, the realms of the Mongol Empire.

a lot of exchange between the court of the Ilkhan, centered in Persia and Central Asia, and the Mongol court centered in China and Mongolia, the homeland. It also promoted the spread of religions, whether Christianity at one point, especially Islam and Buddhism, a great deal. And it's inconceivable to talk of the modern world, who we are today, without taking these people into account.

To be sure, writing is an enormous achievement and the high marks go to the Sumerians for inventing the first written system. It allows us to break the barrier of time and write down our thoughts and transmit it to the next generation. But it's not the whole story.

And the trade across Eurasia, like the Silk Road, which is so important for this exchange, owed very much to the act of participation and protection by the nomads.

It could be individual tribes who would hire out their men as guards to caravans or would breed camels in the Middle Ages, these hybrid camels that could be used as beasts of burden. Any merchant trading along the Silk Road always bought what were called tag goods. Those are additional goods that they could barter and exchange or just give as gifts to the nomadic tribes along the way that made the routes possible and safe.

And then any ruler with a great confederation would very much want to control these trade routes and impose peace, security, and of course be able to tax it. And furthermore, we do know that a number of these peoples do eventually adopt writing. There's this very old Turkish tradition.

It looks like Norse runes, and it's actually appropriate that it was a Danish philologist who first deciphered them. But they're in the Orkhon Valley in what is now Mongolia, and these are the earliest Turkish inscriptions. One particularly I quote a great deal because of its value about the Turks of the 8th century by Bilge Khan. That inscription shows that they have invented their own phonetic writing system

on their own in order to memorialize great deeds and probably kept various records. So they do learn literacy at different points. And we do know examples of this Turkish runes have popped up as far as Bulgaria and Hungary, that it was probably widely spread, and it was the conversion to Islam that

led to the abandonment of this alphabet and the adaptation of the Arabic alphabet, which was not particularly well suited for the Turkish language. It was difficult to do the transition. But as Muslims, they were going to make sure that their Turkish language was in the writing similar to the sacred language. That would be the appropriate connection they would make.

So you're absolutely correct about this. And I also put a great deal of credit to Marco Polo painting that image of Kublai Khan and Cathay and his fabulous Palace of Xanadu because the Europeans were just

with this idea. And that eventually leads to the age of European discovery. Once you have ocean-going vessels, well, we'll sail west and we've got to bump into Cathay and then we'll get all the goods that Marco told us about 150 years earlier. They just didn't bank on running into two new continents. So in writing the book, it was so much fun to make these connections.

And writing a book like this is a continuation of my teaching. I've been a teacher 43 years. I enjoy teaching immensely and lecturing. And writing a book that's aimed for the more general public is a way of continuing that. And, yeah.

You know, we're just unstoppable this way. We love our audiences. Well, we'll make this the last question. I remember reading a wonderful book called China Marches West, which was talking about the, because you alluded to it earlier, the Chinese conquest of the steppe to their west while the Russian conquest of their steppe to their east is going on. It's a little analogous to the conquest of the American west.

And once those two powers conquered their their step areas, the importance of the locally grown step tribes in that region seemed to be subsumed under the sort of nation state paradigm that's existed ever since. And they seem, no offense intended, like backwaters compared to the importance that they used to have.

I can envision ways that those places could become extremely important again, whether it's through lithium or other discoveries of important minerals. Where do you see the future of those areas, whether we're talking about Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan? Where do you see the future of those areas in the next century? Well, that's that's asking me to be. Well, we have the Uyghur problem right now. So that's that's as we go on. Yes.

Yeah, the Uyghurs, the government in Beijing has inherited the policy going back to the Emperor Wu Di, and that is to subject these people and signify them one way or the other. And the Chinese are not going to willingly give up control of that region.

You'd have to have the collapse of the central authority in China for that region to become autonomous again, and I suspect many Chinese colonists might leave. And the same would be true for Tibet and even for Inner Mongolia. These are areas that have been attached to China. As a result of the Chinese central authority, we will not be invaded by barbarians again.

We will never have a Mongol rule over us. Only the Han people are entitled to have the mandate of heaven. Okay, we'll make a slight adjustment for the Manchu Qing, but that's the ideology. It's the Han and Tang ideology.

I do think with the Belt Road Initiative that Beijing is pushing now, it's an effort to reassert control in that region. I doubt that it will be all that successful for a number of reasons. And I think depending on what happens to Russia in this war against the Ukraine, Russian influence in these regions might actually loosen and these states might go their own way from the Russian confederation.

we may be seeing a breakup of the Russian Confederation. I just don't know. The outcome of the current war is difficult to predict.

Turkey has tried to make initiatives in Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan. They've sent in engineers, educators, business people to try to forge ties. This is going back to appeals to pan-Turkism. But really, given Turkey's geographic position and its economy, it's not in a position to significantly change these states.

I do think the future might be for greater independence in those areas. Now, what kind of government will emerge is hard to say. Right now, you have authoritarian governments there. The discovery of mineral resources or petroleum, of course, helps if they go into exploit. But you think of what the Russians did to the Aral Sea. They completely mismanaged it and destroyed it in ill-considered

effort to irrigate for cotton and other products. So I don't think Mongolia at this point, it has precarious position between China and Russia. I don't know what the future of Mongolia will be there. They are subject to the fact that there are these two great powers since the 16th century that have dictated a lot of the politics on the steppes.

My thanks to Professor Kenneth W. Harrell for coming on the program today and talking about one of my all-time favorite subjects. His new book should be available by the time this show comes out. It's called Empires of the Steps, a history of the nomadic tribes who shaped civilization. And as usual, in order to facilitate the process of buying it, should you want to, we will link to it in the show notes. Update on the next big hardcore history. We work on it every day and we release it as soon as it's done.

It is part two in our Viking story, Twilight of the Iser. If you would like an email from us when it's out or an email from us when another Hardcore History addendum drops or when we have some important news updates, announcements, or bonus content to share, for example, the article I wrote on the congressional hearings recently on the UFO phenomenon, why not consider joining us?

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