Kenneth W. Harl, Empires of the Steppe: The Nomadic Tribes Who Shaped Civilisation (London, 2023).
Wiener Neustadt is a small town in Austria, known for its chocolate-box architecture: guidebooks recommend visiting the military academy, the mineral museum, and a moderately interesting water tower. One might easily imagine it has always been this way – a pleasant little place, untroubled by the wider world.
But here, in 1241, one of the most extraordinary episodes in world history unfolded. That spring, the armies of the Mongol empire had burst out of the distant eastern steppes and laid waste to Poland, Bohemia, and Hungary. Whole cities were put to the sword, and assembled European forces lured into traps and shattered. Lumbering, heavily armoured knights were easily picked off from a distance by mounted archers wielding powerful composite bows. Two Mongol generals, Subutai and Jebe, chased Bela IV, the defeated king of Hungary, halfway to Greece. All Christendom was in crisis. Who were these mysterious, brutally violent horsemen? Could they be defeated? In that panicked summer, it looked as if they might conquer Europe.
In just forty years, Genghis Khan, his son Ogedei and his grandson Kublai had created history’s largest contiguous empire, stretching from China to Ukraine. At its greatest expanse, nomadic warriors who had saddled up on the Amur were watering their horses in the Danube. Had they pressed on a little further, Vienna would likely have fallen. Europe was in disarray, and ripe for the taking.
What would have happened had they continued their rampage? Further east, the Mongols – with a suitably nomadic horror of cities – had burned Kyiv and Moscow to the ground: a divergence often said to have set Russia and Ukraine on a harder path than Western Europe. Their taste for heavy taxes and arbitrary violence there gave rise to the concept of a ‘Tartar yoke’ that may well explain subsequent Russian economic and political psychology (although, like all ideas that seem too good to be true, it has since been vigorously contested). Would Western Europe have suffered the same fate? The implications are staggering. Just what would the world today look like if Western Europe, just then gearing up for the Renaissance, had been snuffed out?
But it was not to be. The Mongols disappeared nearly as soon as they had arrived, filtering back into the steppes come autumn. Historians remain divided as to why. Maybe the pasturage in Hungary wasn’t good enough for their horses, and the mud was too thick. Perhaps they had been called back to Mongolia by the death of their Khan, as protocol demanded. Most likely, their high command had decided that Europe wasn’t worth the trouble. In the 1200s, it was a poor, backwards promontory of Asia. There were much richer pickings to be had in the civilised world: the caravanserais of the Silk Roads; the great cities of Islam, from Baghdad to Herat; the unparalleled wealth and technological sophistication of China; the silk and silver of Japan; the bazaars and spices of Java; the fine timbers of Vietnam. The Mongols would never return to Europe.
Weiner Neustadt, therefore, has the dubious honour of marking the point where the Mongol tide broke. Here, one of the last great battles between European knights and nomadic horsemen was fought. Left behind in the wreckage was the most extraordinary captive. Though dressed in Mongol garb, he was clearly European. He spoke Hungarian, French, Latin and a number of unfamiliar Eastern languages. His face and voice were somehow familiar to prominent nobles who came to inspect this curious prisoner. One swore that he dimly remembered him from a failed crusade in Palestine twenty-five years earlier. Under torture, he confessed all. He was a monk. He was a disgraced member of the Knights Templar. He was an Englishman.
His name went unrecorded, but a painstaking investigation by the Hungarian historian (and honorary Scot) Gabor Ronay in the 1970s concluded that he was probably Friar William, an advisor to one of the barons who had signed the Magna Carta in 1215. The rebel noblemen and their retinues were later exiled to the Continent; several went on pilgrimage to the Holy Land to atone. The Englishman appears to have joined them and stayed there after his masters were forgiven. He joined the Knights Templar, but was cast out for gambling, and wandered as a penitent as far south as Basra, picking up Arabic along the way. Here, Mongol secret agents identified and recruited him as an ideal candidate to join their remarkable empire.
By now, the Mongols had begun their campaigns against the great Islamic empires of Central Asia. In the process they had begun to unify Eurasia, later establishing – albeit with extreme violence – the Pax Mongolica, or Mongol Peace. Chroniclers would say that, under their guard, a virgin carrying a golden bowl could walk from Damascus to Hangzhou unaccosted. It was, after all, the rule of the Mongols that made Marco Polo’s later journey to China possible – and it was a Mongol khan he was going to meet.
Despite their well-deserved reputation for destruction – in true nomadic style, after levelling cities, they sometimes turned the ruins over to pasture their sheep – the Mongols were surprisingly progressive. The ruling khans, although themselves dedicated to a pagan monotheist cult of sky-worship, upheld religious pluralism, even hosting debates between Christians, Buddhists and Muslims for their edification and amusement, while their courts were oddly diverse. A Flemish monk, William of Rubruck, who made the arduous trek from Palestine to Mongolia in the 1250s, was astounded to find living at the khan’s court a handful of German prisoners, a French goldsmith, and ‘Basil, son of an Englishman’ (perhaps Friar William?) Of course, it wasn’t just Europeans. Most of the ‘Mongol horde’ were not even Mongols, but recruited from a grand alliance of steppe nomads. Meanwhile, the Khans were keen adopters of new technology. Their empire was stitched together by the world’s first truly international postal system; orders from Mongolia could reach the fringes of Europe in just a few weeks, as specially-trained horsemen barrelled across the steppe at a furious pace, changing mounts at a gallop. Chinese and Persian engineers were hired – and handsomely rewarded – for their knowledge of gunpowder and siege machinery and put to work everywhere from Afghanistan to Egypt. The army operated as a particularly uncompromising meritocracy: skill was rewarded with promotion, but failure resulted in summary execution. It was, in other words, the ideal employer for a rogue English monk.
After being recruited in Iraq, the Englishman travelled east, further and further into the Mongol realms. His confession betrayed a familiarity with the farthest parts of the steppe, but it is unclear how long he was there, or what he was doing. Ronay, for one, believed that his European interrogators preferred to gloss over the awkward proof that their rivals were better organised and more forward-thinking, promoting on the basis of talent rather than bloodline. They did not want to consider how a humble English monk might have reached the upper echelons of the Mongol diplomatic corps, and they had no interest in what he could have told them about the mighty kingdoms of the east – the very things for which Marco Polo would become famous a generation later. Eventually, given his command of European languages, the Englishman was dispatched west to meet his fate at Wiener Neustadt. After his torture and confession, he was declared a traitor to Christendom. He was executed as a common criminal, and his body thrown in an unmarked grave, alongside those of his Mongol compatriots. There, he passed from history.
Horsemen and history
This extraordinary story is perhaps one of the best introductions to the themes that Kenneth Harl hammers home in his new book, although it does not appear in his text. How have urban societies, from Europe to China, dealt with – and been shaped by – their nomadic counterparts?
We generally neglect or misrepresent the roles of nomads. All too often, we’re primed to see them as history’s Other – wandering horsemen who periodically burst out of the untamed steppe to lay waste to the civilised world before retreating back into the endless grassland from whence they came. Nomad kings have nicknames like ‘the Scourge of God’, ‘the Conqueror’ and ‘the Prince of Destruction’. They can seem more like a natural disaster than like people.
From the Great Wall of China to Attila the Hun versus the Romans, we often define ourselves against nomads. History is often a record of urban civilisations overcoming them, then rounding them up. From a contemporary perspective, it can seem as if the long contest is finally over, and cities have triumphed over the steppe. Today, fewer people than ever before in history remain truly nomadic. Even in Mongolia, the majority of the population live in Ulaanbaatar, the capital – in yurts that go nowhere.
But what, Harl asks, if this shouldn’t be how we see nomads and nomadism? What if, instead, we should see them as a vital partner in the long story of civilisation? What if nomads brought not just chaos and destruction, but culture and trade as well? Who among us has stopped to think about what those who refused to settle in cities have done for those of us who live safe within their walls?
Most of us know a little about the nomad conquerors, even if we’re not historians. The book begins with Attila the Hun and ends with Tamerlane, via Genghis Khan – all of whom are familiar enough, even if we might focus more on their crimes than their achievements. But there is far more detail here. It is, undoubtedly, a deeply unfamiliar history, even for those with a passion for the subject. Those who’ve read John Man’s excellent books will know their Xiongnu from their Jurchens – but they will need to be keep notes here. Harl doesn’t pull his punches, and the book is a seemingly endless parade of kings, peoples and wars offered with minimal context and an impressive confidence that readers can keep up: Kavad (whoever he is) jettisons his Mazdakite allies, while later someone has ‘a desultory war against the Hephthalites’; a man appears and disappears in less than a page, having ‘won renown as the Sword of Islam’ (apparently a commonplace enough thing for Harl to not go into it).
Harl is an academic historian, with a background in numismatics, or the study of coins: a field utterly vital to research but with a reputation for missing the forest for the trees. This has filtered into the text. Presented with a vast sweep of history, full of terrific characters and shocking scenes – cannibal kings drinking the blood of their wives to outfox death, kidnapped Chinese princesses writing heartbreaking letters home pining for favourite foods, and world-conquerors building towers of skulls outside vanquished cities as ghastly memorials to their own power – Harl has instead produced a steady, workmanlike account that moves more like a plodding European baggage train than a swift Mongol horseman. No stone is left unturned, and no detail ignored. While this is an admirable service to academe, there is little narrative energy to compensate, and Harl’s more unorthodox ideas arrive unannounced and recede just as quickly, while the conclusion is a rush job. There is no faulting the quality of his scholarship – he has surely forgotten more than most of us will ever learn – but there is no escaping the fact that the job has been done better elsewhere. Anthony Sattin has also recently come out with a better-paced but still rigorous account, while Peter Frankopan’s work remains the gold standard for balancing academic precision with popular appeal. The glowing reception of The Silk Roads nearly a decade ago showed that many of us in the west have a real interest in learning more about obscure peoples and faraway places. But those hoping for a thrilling canter through history’s forgotten half will have to look elsewhere. Harl’s book is strictly for the most dedicated enthusiasts, to whom we can say: good luck remembering just who the Mazadkites were.
