The Penguin History of the World

1 The Central Eurasian Crossroads

For more than fifteen hundred years, from the second century BC to the fourteenth century AD, the lands of Central Eurasia were key parts of human history. The best way of thinking of their centrality is to see the area between the Korean borders and the plains of eastern Europe as a conveyor-belt of technologies and ideas, and of peoples, through massive migrations and the unsteady rise of very large, but usually transient, empires. From the Xiongnu, who challenged the Chinese during the early Han dynasty, to the Mongols who ruled much of the world in the thirteenth century, the central Eurasian steppe was a vast crossroads that linked China, India, the Middle East and Europe together, sometimes through war and conquest but more often through trade and religious exchanges. For humanity as a whole, this period saw the last sets of subjugations of settled peoples by their nomadic neighbours, and it is impossible to understand the transition from the classical to the modern world without knowing its impact.

The area in which all of this began, which we – for lack of a better term – call Central Eurasia, is a huge region; it runs like an enormous corridor from east to west for 4,000 miles or so. Its northern wall is the Siberian forest mass; the southern is provided by deserts, great mountain ranges and the plateaux of Tibet and Iran. For the most part it is grassy steppe, whose boundary with the desert fluctuates. That desert also shelters important oases, which have always been a distinctive part of its economy. They had settled populations whose way of life aroused the antagonism and envy of the nomads. The oases were most frequent and richest in the region of the two great rivers known to the Greeks as the Oxus and the Jaxartes. Cities rose there which were famous for their wealth and skills – Bukhara, Samarkand, Merv – and the trade routes which bound distant China to the Middle East and Europe passed through them.

The first steppe people who came to influence the larger history of the world were the Xiongnu, nomads who for five centuries around Year 0 lived in what is today Mongolia and eastern parts of Xinjiang. The Xiongnu were the great rivals of Han China, and several times penetrated deep into the new Chinese empire before their power was diluted by internal dissent and the Han were able to subdue their southern sub-division. Since all we know about the Xiongnu today (including their name) comes from Chinese sources, it is hard to know much about the internal structure of their state. As so many Central Eurasian states after them, they were probably a coalition of different ethnic groups, welded together by common rites and beliefs born in war, and led by an élite linked by oaths and blood-bonds into regarding itself as one family. They were a formidable war-fighting machine, centred on light, fast cavalry, with weapons and techniques taken over from their Chinese rivals and put to use to secure their hegemony all over the eastern steppe.

The Xiongnu are sometimes equated as a group with the Huns, who arrived in the western part of Central Eurasia around the time of the collapse of the last Xiongnu state in the east. While there may be some connection between the two, what is certain is that the Huns who reached Europe must have gone through several cultural and political changes after any association they may have had with the Xiongnu empire. But the speculations about Hun origins point to two important aspects of life in the Central Eurasian regions up to our own time. It was one region, with no natural barriers blocking the main routes between the eastern and the western steppe. Peoples, religions, languages, ideas and technologies could move easily from one end of the great plains to the other, unless they were held up by sudden alterations in political conditions or by war. This interconnectivity opened up vast possibilities for trade but also for social transformation, with whole ethnic groups changing identities, faith and even names as they moved across the steppe.

The lifestyles of the Central Eurasian peoples changed very little, though, across this vast territory. The Xiongnu, like the Scythians who dominated the western steppe roughly at the same time as the Xiongnu controlled the east, were nomads, herding their horses, cattle and sheep from pasture to pasture. They were skilled horsemen and especially adept in the use of the composite bow, the weapon of the mounted archer, which took extra power from its construction not from a single piece of wood but from strips of wood and horn. They could carry out elaborate weaving, carving and decoration, but did not normally create towns and cities of their own. Being nomads, they often engaged in trade, even over long distances. It was frequently trade, rather than conquest, that first brought these nomadic groups into contact with the great empires that surrounded them – China, Persia and the eastern Roman empire. But having seen the wealth of the settled world, they aspired to take part in it, either by using their swords or by spending their silver.

The people who took over from the Xiongnu as masters of the eastern steppe were the Avars, and we know a bit more about them. Like their predecessors, they were a mixed people, with Turkic, Iranian and Mongol elements. They were ruled by an emperor, called the khagan, who aspired to control all of Eurasia, and came very close to doing so in the fifth century. It is likely that the westward expansion of the Avars was one reason for the massive movements of peoples out of west-central Eurasia in this period; they were pushed out, as much as seeking greener pastures elsewhere when the borders of the Roman empire in the west broke down. Huns, Goths and Iranian-speaking Alans then moved into central and even western Europe from their homelands on the steppe, setting up new states, and linking up with Germanic and Slavic tribes in the process.

By the late sixth century AD the Avars had conquered what is today Hungary and had broken through to the Adriatic. A main reason for their military success was their mastery of cavalry warfare; they were the first to begin using the stirrup, which must have given them important advantages over their enemies. Around AD 600, the Avars seemed set to become masters of Europe as well as parts of Asia. In 626 they laid siege to Constantinople in alliance with the Sassanid Persians, but failed to conquer the city. The eastern Avars (called Rouran by the Chinese) were contained by the Sui dynasty, but never submitted to Chinese dominance and continued a gradual expansion eastwards well into the seventh century.

What broke Avar power was one of the most remarkable transformations of the whole Eurasian region, the rise of the Turk. Originally a subject people of the Avars, the Turk emerged as a separate entity from the mid-fifth century AD. Their mythology was centred on the Altai Mountains, and especially a place they called Ötükän Yish, which was supposed to be where they originated from. In the late fifth century they spread from north-central Mongolia to other parts. Their leaders probably had experience of warfare both from the Hun and the Avar federations, and when they challenged the Avars for supremacy in the sixth century they were well prepared and well organized. By the mid-seventh century they dominated all of the Central Eurasian zone, from Korea to the Black Sea.

Part of the reason for the Turk success was their willingness to embrace all putative allies, combined with what seems to have been a distinct cultural attractiveness. Originally the Turk élite believed in the sky god, Tängri. But some converted to Buddhism very early, and others took up Manichaeism or Christianity. By the time they conquered the region around the Aral Sea the Turk themselves were a federation of different beliefs and different ethnic groups, tied together by Turkic language and culture. The Turk political project only lasted a bit more than a generation but left a legacy similar to that of Alexander the Great, who through conquest had set off new cultural directions across a vast territory almost a thousand years earlier.

Not all of the Turk influence was through their military expansion. Probably because of Turk trading skills and their general cultural inclusiveness, we have examples of whole ethnic groups taking over a Turkic identity without ever having been militarily defeated by outsiders. This may account for the enormous number of Turkic groups that appear in the later history of Asia and Europe: the Azeri, Kazakh, Kyrgyzs, Turkmen, Uighur, Bashkir, Khazars, Bulgars, Mamluks, Timurids, Ottomans, and of course the modern Turkish, just to mention a few. The spread of Turk culture in the seventh and eighth centuries shows that what they possessed was attractive to others in a vast zone from Manchuria to Anatolia.

The Turkic groups that moved west played a key role in the history of eastern Europe and the Middle East by limiting the influence of the Persians in the north. By at first allying with the eastern Roman empire they helped it survive and undertake the transformation into Byzantium that ensured its continuation for nearly another thousand years. One of the stranger inheritors of the Turk was the Khazar khaganate, which from around 630 ruled the Pontic steppe between the Black Sea and the Caspian. Its reigning dynasty converted to Judaism in 740 under Khagan Bulan, both, it has been assumed, out of conviction and because of the need to set up a separate identity that was neither Christian nor Muslim. The Khazars remained a major power until they were crushed by the expanding Rus state in the late tenth century.

Further west, another Turkic group, the Bulgars, moved into the north-western parts of the Black Sea region, mingling with Slavic peoples and gradually adopting their language. They were to have a significant influence on the history of the Slavs. Another group, the Seljuks, moved into the region around the Aral Sea. Their first king had served with the Khazars (which accounts for his sons being named Musa, Mikail and Israil), and learnt both trade and warfare principles from them. In the eleventh century his successor, Malik Shah, took over parts of Anatolia – today’s Turkey – which he incorporated into an expanding Seljuk empire.

The Turk inheritance influenced the eastern part of Asia as well. The Chinese Tang dynasty was part-Turkic in origin, which probably explains why it was so preoccupied with attempting to control the eastern steppe. But although the Tang defeated the eastern Turkic groups several times in the seventh and early eighth centuries, they survived as independent powers all the way up to the rise of the Mongols in the eleventh century. On China’s north-western borders the Uighur, yet another Turkic group, set up their own independent kingdom in the mid-eighth century.

The Uighur state, led by a dynasty which was originally Manichean in religion (most Uighurs did not convert to Islam until the fifteenth century), formed an important geographical and historical link between China and South Asia. The Sogdians, a great trading people who lived to their immediate west, around Samarkand and Bukhara, and who had continued trading all over Central Eurasia whichever empire had been in charge, taught them the principles of the Silk Road, and the Uighurs were happy to continue the tradition. But the Uighurs were also influenced by a great empire – long gone by the eighth century – that had ruled south of Sogdiana, from Afghanistan into north India, in the first half of the millennium. This was Kushan, whose Indo-European élite originated from the same area which the Uighurs were later to control. It was through their dominions that Buddhism had spread first to Central Asia and then to China.

Central Eurasia, then, was not just a periphery from which barbarians threatened the great civilizations of the east, south and west. It was a vast clearing-house for trade and ideas and a centre of political power for a very long period of time. This era was not over by the end of the first millennium AD: its most important phase – that of the Mongol empires – was still to come. But by the eighth century the political constellations had changed. The Byzantine empire had not only survived but was reasserting itself. In China, the Tang dynasty was reviving Chinese power in the Central Eurasian heartland. But the most important change was to come from the south, where Arab armies, fuelled by a new faith, were on the march. In July 751 some of these armies confronted a Tang army in the battle of Atlakh, near the north-western border of what is today Kyrgyzstan. The Arabs were victorious. The Islamization of Central Asia could begin in earnest, thereby setting off another time-period in the history of this vast region.