Catastrophe: An Investigation Into the Origins of the Modern World (14 page)

T H E  T U R K I S H
T I M E  B O M B

J
ust as the climatically induced political changes on the Mongolian steppe had helped to reshape Eastern European and Middle Eastern history through the agency of the defeated Avars, so it was that those same changes, this time through the good offices of the victors, the Turks, led ultimately to huge changes in the Balkans, North Africa, and the Middle East, and even in India and in the Jewish world.

However, whereas the Avar-associated changes took only 150 years to unfold (see Chapters 3 and 4), equally dramatic changes in the Turkic world took nearly a thousand years to do so. How did a climatically induced political and ethnic revolution in sixth-century Mongolia end up a thousand or more years later affecting so much of humanity from Bohemia to Bangladesh?

The sequence of events was complex, but the trigger that set it in motion was almost certainly the climatic chaos of the 530s. As already described in Chapter 3, it was the differences in their respective vulnerability to drought that led to the mighty Avar empire being overturned by the Avars’ vassals, the Turks. Whereas the Avar leader committed suicide and many of his people fled west, the victorious Turks set about creating their own steppe empire. Within a decade, it stretched from the borders of Korea to the Crimea. At its heart was a royal clan, an emperor (known as the
kagan
), a mysterious legend, and a sacred cave.

The royal clan of the Turks, the Ashina (literally, “noble lord”) family, traced its ancestry back through legend in typical totemic style to an animal, not a human. Their family origin myth tells the story of a young child who was the sole survivor of a tribal massacre. All his family and friends having been slaughtered, he alone escaped and hid in a nearby cave. There he encountered a she-wolf and, like Romulus and Remus of ancient Rome, was adopted and suckled by her. The pair became inseparable, and when the child grew into a man, he had sex with the wolf, which then gave birth to a son—the first Ashina.

The sacred cave—where, according to legend, the sole survivor of the tribal holocaust was suckled by the wolf and where the first Ashina was conceived—became the religious and ritual epicenter of the empire. Although the supreme deity of the Turks was Tengri, the sky god, it was the cult of the wolf that was politically far more important. The cave—the exact location of which has now long been forgotten—lay somewhere in the sacred core territory of the Turk nation, a sort of Turkic holy land, the area of Mongolia known as Outuken Yish (literally, “forested mountain of the Otuken”).

According to ancient Chinese sources, the cave of the wolf ancestor was a place of sacrifice and ritual.¹ It was probably there that the bizarre coronation rituals of the
kagan
s took place. Riding across the steppe, their long black hair streaming out behind them, their giant mustaches rigid and stiff despite the relentless wind, thousands of Turk noblemen and their families and retainers would have converged on the holy ground. An aura of dust whipped up by countless horses’ hooves and the massive high wheels of heavily laden ox-drawn carts would have begun to envelop the city of round felt tents that had begun to spring up around the sacred cave.

When all had arrived, the new
kagan
was brought out, held aloft on a large felt rug. He was spun around and thrown into the air nine times, then placed on a horse that he had to ride in a circle nine times. Next he was lifted off the horse, placed upon the ground, and half strangled with a silken cord. As he gasped for air, his consciousness beginning to alter and reduce, he had to answer one ritual royal question: “How long will you reign?”²

The answer, uttered by the semiconscious
kagan
-elect, was seen as having divine authority. The assembled multitude may well have seen the reply as emanating from the spirit of the first Ashina or his wolf-mother rather than merely from the mouth of their new monarch. His destiny now mapped out, the silken noose was loosened and the new
kagan
was free to breathe again and rule for the allotted time.

Although the
kagan
was the overall ruler of the Turkic empire, he governed in conjunction with a powerful, though technically junior, partner known as the Yabghu. This co-ruler was responsible for governing the whole of the western half of the empire. The first Yabghu was the extraordinarily talented Ashina Turk general who first conquered the 2,500 miles of steppe between Mongolia and the Ukraine. His name was Ishtemi, and as the brother of the first
kagan,
Bumin, he had almost unchallenged political authority in the Turkic world.

Armed with bows and arrows, swords, lances, and even battle lassoes for pulling their opponents off their horses, the mounted hordes of Turk warriors penetrated every region of the steppes. The realm of the proto-Mongolian White Huns collapsed under Turk pressure, and on the southern fringes of the steppe, the great Iranian city-states of Bukhara, Samarkand, and Khwarazm surrendered to Ishtemi and his armies.

Ishtemi ruled as Yabghu for twenty-four years (552–576), and although he never became supreme
kagan,
he was for periods the only really permanent ruling personality within the empire, as his brother Bumin died in 553 and three of his sons succeeded him between that year and 573.

The empire continued (apart from a brief twenty-five-year interlude) for almost two centuries until the 740s, when the Ashina ruling clan was dislodged from power by a coalition of other Turks, including Uighurs (long-standing rivals of the Ashina), Qarluqs (whose leaders were actually of Ashina origin), and Oghuzis. The most powerful element, the Uighurs, then seized power, turned on their Qarluq allies, and proceeded to try to wipe them out. Those who remained alive fled west in 745 and had succeeded in taking over the western part of the empire by 766.

So far, the expansion and evolution of Turkic influence and power, first uncorked by the climatic catastrophe of the 530s, had been relatively conventional. But in the early and mid–tenth century, intermittent conflict between the Arab caliphate (the Islamic empire founded by Muhammad and ruled by his successors) and the Qarluq Turkic state resulted in large numbers of Qarluq and other Turkic prisoners being captured by the caliphate. The caliphate’s strategy (operated on their behalf by their eastern governors, the Samanids) was above all to acquire slaves, as well as to discomfit and discourage potential Turkic aggressors.³ The Turkic prisoners were turned into slave-soldiers, most of whom were then converted from paganism to Islam and given their freedom on condition they remained loyal to the caliphate.

But ultimately the policy backfired dramatically. For instead of buckling down to a life of unquestioning obedience, the Turkic slave-soldiers tried in 962 to help “fix” the Samanid succession. They failed, but proceeded nevertheless to set up their own Turkic slave-soldier state (that of the Ghaznavids) in southern Afghanistan.

Within forty years the Arab caliph had formally given the slave-soldier state’s ruler, Mahmud, the title of sultan. Mahmud, the second ruler in the Ghaznavid dynasty, proceeded to establish a substantial empire within and outside the caliphate. His territory stretched from eastern Iran to what is now northern Pakistan, and it was Turkic involvement in the latter area that was to launch the religious transformation of much of the Indian subcontinent over subsequent centuries. From 1040 onward military pressure from their enemies forced the Ghaznavids to concentrate their energies on northwest India. Prior to that date, they had primarily been interested in raiding wealthy Hindu temples, but beginning in the middle of the century, they increasingly established political control in such areas as Kashmir, Lahore, northern Sind, and Baluchistan.

It was this political control that first saw the substantial introduction of Islam into India—a process that was to further accelerate under later Turkic and then Mughal rulers in subsequent centuries and which ultimately led to the partition of India in 1947 and the creation of Pakistan. If the Ghaznavid empire of the eleventh century had not established a substantial Islamic bridgehead into India, thus altering the religious and therefore geopolitical balance, it is doubtful whether later Muslims, culminating in the Mughals, would have been able to complete the job.

Just as the Qarluq Turks had fled from their erstwhile allies (the Uighurs) in 745, their fellow rebels, the Oghuz Turks, also fled a generation later, in the 770s.
⁴
And just as the Qarluqs had had an impact on India, so the Oghuzis were destined to have an equal, if not greater, effect on Europe and the Middle East. The Oghuzi refugees, fleeing for their lives, arrived on the banks of the Aral Sea and rapidly created their own Turkic state around the north, east, and west of that great inland expanse of water. On the banks of the Syrdarya River, they then set about creating a capital for themselves, Yangi Kent (literally, “new city”).

Gradually one of the Oghuzi clans, the Seljuks, began to emerge as a powerful element within the Oghuz Turkic state, and in 985 they converted to Islam, a move which enabled the clan to more “legitimately” attack its still-pagan fellow Oghuzis.

Soon the Seljuks had become the leading element among the Oghuz Turks, a status that was confirmed in 1040 when they led the Oghuzis into battle against their fellow Turks of the Ghaznavid dynasty and won. This had the dual effect both of forcing the Ghaznavids to retreat and concentrate on faraway India and of allowing the Seljuk clan to evolve into a superpower, for when the official ruler of the Arab caliphate heard of the Seljuks’ success, he invited them into his territory—indeed, into his capital, Baghdad—to ally with him against his enemies. Thus it was that in 1055 the Seljuks and their Oghuz army annihilated the Iranian military warlords who had run the caliphate, irrespective of the caliph’s wishes, for the previous 110 years.
⁵

The victory made the Seljuk Turkic clan virtual masters of the Islamic world. Two extraordinary brothers, Toghrul and Chaghri, were made sultans of the caliphate by the caliph himself. Soon the Oghuz were colliding with the eastern frontiers of the Roman Empire, and in 1071, at the Battle of Manzikert in eastern Anatolia, Chaghri’s son and heir, Alp Arslan (literally, “brave lion”), shattered the Roman army.
⁶

In a sense, the Battle of Manzikert marked the beginning of the end for the Roman Empire, for by the late thirteenth century, another Oghuz group was coming to prominence in the frontier country where the caliphate and the empire met. Their leader was Osman, the founder of the Ottoman dynasty, which was destined to create one of the world’s greatest empires.

Within fifty years the Ottomans had taken over most of Anatolia (modern Turkey) and had been invited to participate in the internal affairs of the Roman Empire.
⁷
Soon they were in Europe, and they had reached the Danube by the 1380s. More than 1,750 years of Roman imperial history finally came to an end with the fall of Constantinople in 1453 when the Ottoman sultan, Muhammad the Conqueror, claimed to combine in his rule the imperial traditions of the Turkic steppe, the caliphate, and the Roman Empire itself.

Over the next few centuries the Ottoman Empire conquered and ruled all of southeast Europe, most of North Africa (including Egypt), and most of the Middle East. In the late sixteenth century their armies even reached the outskirts of Vienna. Today the Republic of Turkey, the Turkish presence in Cyprus, and the sometimes embattled enclaves of Bosnia and Kosovo as well as Albania are the living legacy of the Ottoman advance.

P
erhaps an even more fundamental geopolitical legacy is the fault line that divides the political and social culture of Europe between East and West. For although the Ottoman Empire was one of the world’s most glittering political achievements between the fifteenth and seventeenth centuries, by around 1700 the state had become deeply conservative, resistant to any and all innovation. Politically and economically, eastern Europe bears the mark of up to 180 years of stiflingly conservative government experienced at precisely the time that western Europe was industrializing and internationalizing.

Thus it was that, for good and for ill, the Turkish genius for empire building and for adapting was liberated in the wake of the climatic catastrophe of the sixth century. And thus it was that the Turk tide rolled ever westward (and southward) to shape so much of today’s world.