Nomadic empire

Based on Wikipedia: Nomadic empire

The Horse Warriors Who Shaped History

Imagine a military force so mobile that no wall could stop it. No city could hide from it. No army could outrun it. For over two thousand years, horse-riding warriors from the vast grasslands of Central Asia built empires that stretched from Korea to Hungary, from Siberia to India. They conquered some of the greatest civilizations in human history—China, Persia, Rome's successors—not despite being nomads, but precisely because of it.

These weren't wandering bands of raiders. They were sophisticated political entities that historians call nomadic empires, sometimes steppe empires, and they represent the most successful non-sedentary states the world has ever known.

The Paradox of the Mounted Archer

The nomadic empires shared a devastating military advantage: the compound bow wielded from horseback. A skilled steppe warrior could fire arrows accurately while riding at full gallop, retreat faster than infantry could pursue, and sustain campaigns across distances that would exhaust any foot army.

But here's what made these empires truly interesting. Their greatest strength was also their fundamental limitation.

Horses need grass. Lots of it. A cavalry force of ten thousand horses consumes pastureland at an astonishing rate. The moment these conquering armies settled down to rule their new territories, they faced an impossible choice: keep enough horses to remain militarily dominant, or give up the pastures needed to feed those horses to agriculture and permanent settlement.

This created a strange economic relationship between the settled civilizations and the nomads who threatened them. China, for instance, desperately needed horses to defend against nomadic invasions—but the only reliable source of quality warhorses was the nomads themselves. The Chinese found themselves buying military capability from the very people they needed that capability to fight.

The nomads, meanwhile, discovered that trading horses was often more profitable than raiding. Commerce reduced violence. But it also meant the nomads accumulated wealth without abandoning their mobile lifestyle, which only made them stronger over time.

The Khaldunian Cycle

The great Arab historian Ibn Khaldun, writing in 1377, noticed a pattern that would repeat itself across nomadic empires for centuries. He called it asabiyyah—roughly translated as "group solidarity" or "social cohesion."

His theory went like this: nomadic peoples, hardened by the harsh conditions of steppe life, develop intense tribal loyalty and martial prowess. This solidarity allows them to conquer wealthy but soft settled civilizations. But success breeds decay. The conquerors establish capitals in the lands they've taken. They adopt the luxuries and bureaucracies of the peoples they've defeated. Within a few generations, the once-fearsome warriors become indistinguishable from the subjects they rule—and vulnerable to the next wave of tough nomads from the steppe.

Ibn Khaldun estimated this cycle took about four generations. It's a remarkably accurate description of what happened to empire after empire, from the Mongols who became Chinese emperors to the Turks who became Persian shahs.

The First Wave: Scythians and Cimmerians

The earliest nomadic empires emerged from the Pontic-Caspian steppe—the enormous grassland stretching from Ukraine to Kazakhstan, north of the Black Sea and Caspian Sea. This was the original heartland of horse domestication, and the peoples who mastered mounted warfare here would terrorize their neighbors for millennia.

The Cimmerians appear in historical records around 1300 BCE, living north of the Caucasus Mountains. We know frustratingly little about them, though the ancient Greeks considered them so fearsome that Homer placed the entrance to the underworld in their territory. They spoke an Iranian language—or possibly Thracian with Iranian rulers—and controlled the steppes until a more powerful group pushed them out.

That group was the Scythians.

The Scythians dominated the Eurasian steppes from at least 1100 BCE to around 200 CE—an extraordinary run of over a thousand years. The Greeks used "Scythia" as a catch-all term for the mysterious lands northeast of their world, much as medieval Europeans would later use "Tartary." But the Scythians were real, and they were terrifying.

They drank from the skulls of their enemies. They scalped fallen foes and used the hair to decorate their horses. Greek historians recorded these practices with a mixture of horror and fascination. But the Scythians were also master goldsmiths who created stunning animal-style artwork, and they established trade networks connecting the Mediterranean to China centuries before the Silk Road had a name.

The Sarmatians: When Veterans Come Home

The Sarmatians were essentially Scythian veterans. According to ancient sources, they emerged from various Scythian groups—the Saka, the Iazyges, the Skolotoi, the Parthians—who had served in military campaigns across the ancient world and eventually returned to the Pontic-Caspian steppe.

They flourished from the 6th century BCE to the 4th century CE, controlling a vast territory that ancient geographers divided into Sarmatia Europea and Sarmatia Asiatica—together covering about half a million square miles. Like the Scythians, they spoke an Eastern Iranian language.

What's remarkable is how the Sarmatian legacy persisted long after the people themselves disappeared. Centuries later, Polish nobles would claim direct descent from the Sarmatians, creating an elaborate ideology called Sarmatism that shaped Polish identity well into the modern era. The idea that the aristocracy descended from ancient steppe warriors—rather than from the Slavic peasantry they ruled—became a founding myth of Polish nationhood.

The Xiongnu: China's Eternal Enemy

While Iranian-speaking nomads dominated the western steppes, a very different people controlled the eastern grasslands. The Xiongnu (pronounced roughly "shee-ong-noo") established what may have been the first truly unified nomadic empire, and their conflict with China would shape East Asian history for centuries.

The Xiongnu confederation arose on the Mongolian Plateau around the 3rd century BCE. We don't know what language their ruling class spoke—scholars have proposed everything from Turkish to Mongolian to Yeniseian to something entirely unknown. What we do know is that they were formidable enough that Emperor Qin Shi Huang, the first ruler to unify China, built the Great Wall specifically to keep them out.

Think about that. The most famous construction project in human history exists because of the Xiongnu.

Relations between China and the Xiongnu oscillated between war, tribute, trade, and marriage alliances for centuries. Chinese emperors tried everything—military campaigns, bribing the nomads with silk and grain, sending princesses north as brides for Xiongnu leaders. Nothing worked permanently. The Xiongnu remained a threat until their confederation finally collapsed in the 5th century CE.

Some historians believe the Xiongnu, or groups fleeing from them, eventually migrated west and became the Huns who would later terrorize Europe. The connection remains controversial, but the timing is suggestive: the Xiongnu decline in Asia roughly coincides with the Hunnic appearance in Europe.

The Huns: Terror from the East

Around 370 CE, a previously unknown people appeared beyond the Volga River and proceeded to demolish everything in their path. Within decades, they had conquered all of eastern Europe and reached the borders of the Roman Empire.

The Huns terrified the peoples they encountered. Contemporary descriptions portray them as barely human—short, with artificially deformed skulls (a common practice among some nomadic groups), speaking an incomprehensible language, living entirely on horseback. These descriptions were heavily exaggerated, but the Hunnic military prowess was real.

Their appearance triggered one of the great migrations in European history. As the Huns advanced, Germanic tribes—Goths, Vandals, Burgundians, and others—fled westward and southward, crashing into the Roman Empire and ultimately contributing to its fall. The barbarian invasions that ended classical civilization were themselves refugees from an even more fearsome foe.

Under Attila, who ruled from 434 to 453 CE, the Hunnic Empire reached its maximum extent. Attila extracted massive tribute payments from both the Eastern and Western Roman Empires and invaded Gaul and Italy. The Romans called him the "Scourge of God."

Then Attila died—possibly murdered, possibly from a nosebleed on his wedding night—and the empire collapsed almost immediately. His sons fought among themselves, subject peoples revolted, and within a generation the Huns had vanished as a distinct political entity.

Or had they?

The Bulgars: Where Did the Huns Go?

After the last Hunnic king, Dengizich, died in 469 CE, the Huns seem to have been absorbed by other groups. Some historians believe they became the Bulgars, a Turkic-speaking confederation that appeared in the late 5th century.

The Bulgars are fascinating because they show how nomadic peoples transformed as they moved west. Originally emerging somewhere in Central Asia—their roots can possibly be traced to the Volga-Ural region—they absorbed Hunnic remnants, Indo-European peoples, and various other ethnic groups during their westward migration. By the time they appear clearly in Byzantine records around 480 CE, they were a mixed people with Central Asian military traditions and an increasingly diverse population.

They worshipped Tangra, the sky god common to many Turkic and Mongolic peoples. They preserved the shamanic traditions of the steppe. But they were also adapting to their new environment.

In 679 CE, a Bulgar khan named Asparuh crossed the Danube and conquered territory from the Byzantine Empire. He established the First Bulgarian Empire in the Balkans—and here the Khaldunian cycle played out exactly as Ibn Khaldun would later predict. The Bulgars, originally nomadic Turkic warriors, settled down, merged with the local Slavic population, converted to Christianity, adopted Slavic language and customs, and eventually became the ancestors of modern Bulgarians.

Today, Bulgarians speak a Slavic language and follow Eastern Orthodox Christianity. Almost nothing remains of the Turkic nomadic heritage except the name.

The Türk Khaganates: Creating a Name

The word "Turk" entered history around 546 CE, when a people calling themselves Türk overthrew the Rouran confederation and established the First Turkic Khaganate. They were the first people to use this name as a political designation—and they would give it to dozens of peoples across Eurasia, from Anatolia to Siberia.

The Göktürks (meaning "Celestial Turks" or "Blue Turks") controlled an enormous territory across northern China, Mongolia, and Inner Asia. At their height, their empire stretched from Manchuria to the borders of Byzantium, communicating across these distances using their own runic alphabet—the oldest known Turkic writing system.

But like so many nomadic empires, they couldn't maintain unity. Around 600 CE, the empire split into eastern and western halves. Both eventually fell to the Tang dynasty of China. In 680 CE, the Türks rose again, establishing the Second Turkic Khaganate, but this too declined by the mid-8th century.

The political entities didn't last. The identity did. Today, Turkic-speaking peoples live from the Balkans to Siberia—Turks, Azerbaijanis, Kazakhs, Uzbeks, Kyrgyz, Uighurs, Yakuts, and many others—all tracing linguistic ancestry to those original Göktürk warriors.

The Uyghurs and Kyrgyz: Fighting Over the Steppe

When the Second Turkic Khaganate collapsed in 744 CE, the Uyghurs seized the opportunity. The Uyghur Khaganate would control Mongolia and surrounding regions for about a century, and they did something unusual for steppe nomads: they converted to Manichaeism, a Persian dualist religion that taught the universe was a battleground between light and darkness.

The Uyghurs maintained close ties with Tang China, helping suppress rebellions in exchange for silk and other luxury goods. They became wealthy—perhaps too wealthy. When a severe winter killed much of their livestock in the 840s, the weakened khaganate fell to an invasion by the Kyrgyz.

The Yenisei Kyrgyz had been rivals of the Uyghurs for decades, fighting an intermittent war since 820 CE. Their victory in 840 established a Kyrgyz-dominated steppe that would last, with interruptions, until the Mongol conquests. The modern Kyrgyz people of Central Asia trace their heritage to these medieval horse warriors.

The Khitans: When Nomads Write History

The Liao dynasty, established by the Khitan people around 907 CE, shows what happened when nomads ruled over a mixed population of herders and farmers. The Khitans created their own writing system—actually two of them—administered a sophisticated bureaucracy, and controlled all of Manchuria plus parts of northern China for two centuries.

When the Liao fell to the Jurchen Jin dynasty in the 12th century, some Khitan aristocrats fled west and established the Western Liao dynasty in Central Asia. Known to Islamic sources as the Qara Khitai ("Black Khitans"), they ruled over a predominantly Muslim population while maintaining their own distinct identity.

The Western Liao are historically significant beyond their size. When Genghis Khan's Mongols conquered them in the early 13th century, they provided the administrative expertise that helped transform a tribal confederation into a world empire.

The Seljuks: Turks Become Persians

The founder of the Seljuk dynasty began his career serving in the Khazar army—itself originally a nomadic empire that had settled north of the Caucasus. Seljuk and his clan were Oghuz Turks, part of the broader Turkic world, seeking pastureland for their herds.

In 961 CE, Seljuk moved his people to Jend, near the Aral Sea, and converted to Islam—perhaps sincerely, perhaps as a political calculation to gain support from neighboring Islamic states. His grandsons, Tughril and Chaghri Beg, would transform this small clan into one of the great powers of the medieval world.

The decisive moment came in 1040 at the Battle of Dandanaqan, where the Seljuks crushed the Ghaznavid Empire and gained control of Khorasan, the wealthy eastern region of the Islamic world. Within a few decades, Seljuk armies had conquered Persia, Iraq, and much of Anatolia.

The Seljuk conquests of Anatolia—modern Turkey—are particularly significant. When Byzantine Emperor Romanos IV lost the Battle of Manzikert in 1071, he opened Anatolia to Turkish settlement. Over the following centuries, what had been Greek-speaking Christian territory became Turkish-speaking Muslim territory. This transformation, begun by Seljuk warriors, would eventually produce the Ottoman Empire and modern Turkey.

But the Seljuks themselves exemplified Ibn Khaldun's cycle. Within generations of conquering Persia, the Turkish warriors had become Persian emperors, patronizing Persian poetry and art, administering their realm through Persian bureaucrats. The Seljuk court spoke Persian, not Turkish. The conquerors had been conquered by the culture of the conquered.

The Mongol Empire: The Greatest of All

In 1206, a chieftain named Temüjin united the warring tribes of Mongolia and took the title Genghis Khan—"universal ruler." What followed was the largest contiguous land empire in human history.

At its peak, the Mongol Empire stretched from Korea to Poland, from Siberia to Vietnam. It contained perhaps 100 million people, an astounding fraction of the world's population at the time. The Mongols conquered China, Persia, Russia, Central Asia, and Mesopotamia. They destroyed the Abbasid Caliphate, sacked Baghdad, and came within a few battles of conquering Egypt and Western Europe.

The Mongol conquests were catastrophically violent. Cities that resisted were systematically destroyed, their populations massacred. Scholars estimate that the Mongol wars killed somewhere between 30 and 40 million people—perhaps 5% of the world's population at the time.

But the Pax Mongolica that followed brought unprecedented connections across Eurasia. The Silk Road, protected by Mongol authority, carried goods, ideas, technologies, and diseases between civilizations that had barely known of each other's existence. Chinese innovations reached Europe. Persian astronomy influenced Chinese calendars. And, tragically, the Black Death traveled from Central Asia to devastate the medieval world.

After the death of Möngke Khan in 1259, the empire split into four successor states: the Yuan dynasty in China, the Ilkhanate in Persia, the Chagatai Khanate in Central Asia, and the Golden Horde in Russia. Each followed its own version of Ibn Khaldun's cycle. The Yuan rulers became Chinese emperors. The Ilkhans became Persian shahs. The Chagatai khans became Central Asian lords. Only the Golden Horde maintained a somewhat nomadic character, and even they eventually settled and converted to Islam.

Timur: The Last Great Conqueror

Timur—known in the West as Tamerlane, from the Persian "Timur-i-lang," meaning "Timur the Lame"—was born in 1336 near Samarkand, in what is now Uzbekistan. He claimed descent from Genghis Khan (probably falsely) and spent his life trying to recreate the Mongol Empire.

He came terrifyingly close. Between 1370 and his death in 1405, Timur conquered Persia, Mesopotamia, the Caucasus, much of India, and parts of Anatolia. His armies were as brutal as the Mongols had been a century and a half earlier. When Delhi resisted, Timur's forces massacred an estimated 100,000 prisoners. He built towers of skulls outside conquered cities.

Yet Timur also patronized art, architecture, and scholarship. Samarkand became one of the most magnificent cities in the world, filled with mosques, madrasas, and observatories. The contradiction between mass murderer and patron of civilization was no contradiction to Timur—it was simply the way great empires worked.

The Timurid Empire disintegrated after his death, as nomadic empires do. But one of Timur's descendants, Babur, would flee Central Asia after losing his throne and eventually conquer India, establishing the Mughal Empire that would rule the subcontinent until the British arrived.

The End of an Era

After the Ming dynasty expelled the Mongols from China in 1368, they rebuilt and extended the Great Wall to its present form. The message was clear: no more nomadic conquests.

Later Mongol states like the Northern Yuan dynasty and the Dzungar Khanate continued the nomadic tradition into the early modern era. The Dzungars, in particular, built the last significant nomadic empire in the 17th and 18th centuries, controlling much of Central Asia until their genocidal destruction by the Qing dynasty in the 1750s.

Why did the era of nomadic empires end? Partly because of gunpowder. The military advantage of the mounted archer declined as firearms improved. A peasant with a musket could be trained in weeks to kill a warrior who had spent his entire life mastering the compound bow from horseback. The walls that had failed to stop Mongol arrows proved more effective against cavalry charges once defenders had cannons.

But the deeper reason was economic. The settled civilizations grew richer, more populous, and more administratively capable. They could field larger armies, sustain longer wars, and absorb defeats that would have destroyed nomadic confederations. The balance of power that had favored mobility for two thousand years shifted decisively toward organization and numbers.

The Desert Parallel

It's worth noting that the Eurasian steppe wasn't the only place where nomads built empires. The Arabian Peninsula produced its own version: camel-oriented Bedouin societies that functioned as desert-based analogues of the horse-riding empires to the north.

The camel, like the horse, offered mobility across terrain that settled peoples couldn't effectively control. Bedouin tribes dominated Arabian trade routes, raided settled communities, and occasionally—most spectacularly in the 7th century CE—united under charismatic leadership to conquer vast territories. The Arab conquests that created the Islamic caliphate owed much to the same dynamics that had produced the Scythians and the Mongols: mobile warriors with strong tribal solidarity overwhelming wealthy but militarily inferior settled civilizations.

What the Nomads Teach Us

The nomadic empires challenge our assumptions about how civilizations work. We tend to think of settled life as advanced and nomadic life as primitive. But for two thousand years, it was the nomads who conquered the farmers, not the other way around.

The steppe empires were not chaotic bands of barbarians. They had sophisticated political structures, legal codes, diplomatic traditions, and trade networks. The Mongols, in particular, practiced religious tolerance, promoted meritocracy, established postal systems, and maintained international law centuries before these became standard in the "civilized" world.

They remind us that there is more than one way to organize a successful society. The nomadic way—mobile, adaptable, with wealth measured in herds rather than land—was a viable alternative to sedentary civilization for most of human history. It only became obsolete when technology finally shifted the balance of military power.

The descendants of the steppe warriors still live across Eurasia, from Hungary to Korea. Many have forgotten their nomadic past. Others maintain traditions of horsemanship and herding in the grasslands their ancestors once ruled. The empires are gone, but their legacy—in language, in genetics, in the borders of modern nations—remains written across the map of the world.