The Intimate Bond (25 page)
Authors: Brian Fagan
For all the breeding and bartering, horse shortages were a perennial challenge. There were times when there were plenty of cavalrymen but only one or two out of ten had a steed to ride in a military world where large numbers of horsemen were the currency of battle. Generations of Chinese officials worried over the issue of horse procurement without success. Eventually, tea became another commodity exchanged for horses, it being so much in demand by the nomads that it tended to supersede silk. The Song government (960â1279
CE
) set up “Tea and Horse Offices” near the border, to control tea exports and maintain artificially high prices, so they could obtain more beasts. Inevitably, smuggling became endemic, discouraged unsuccessfully by death sentences for offenders. Successive dynasties created elaborate bureaucracies to breed and acquire horses. The Han emperors placed such importance on the horse trade that the official in charge of the program ranked eighth among the highest ministers of state. Despite careful attention to both breeding and grading of horses, the quality of cavalry mounts
was a constant problem. Inevitably, the chronic shortage of horses led to catastrophe, triggered by the conquests of Genghis Khan.
The Flail of God
“I'm a flail of God,” proclaimed the Mongol ruler Genghis Khan from the pulpit of the central mosque at Bokhara in 1220. “If you had not committed great sins, God would not have sent a punishment like me upon you.”
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A flail he truly was, one that descended on great cities and settled lands like a whirlwind. The Mongols had elected Genghis Khan as their great khan in 1206
CE
. Not only a brilliant strategist and conqueror, but also a superb administrator, he quickly broke up the ancient tribal structure and organized his ferocious armies into tightly controlled, standardized units in multiples of ten. The troops fought as small teams so that orders never had to be given to more than ten men. Over just twenty years, Genghis Khan's armies swept westward and southward across the steppes with breathtaking rapidity and ruthless efficiency. Merely the threat of attack caused cities to fall before the Flail of God. Genghis Khan was forging a huge empire that extended over Eurasia, held together by efficient horse-based communication and threats of violence.
Genghis Khan's ancestry lay among people whose lives revolved around horses and supreme horsemanship. He was certainly bloodthirsty and ruthless, but his legacy was far more than conquest. He embraced religious freedom, united complex patchworks of warring tribes, rewarded merit, encouraged education, and advanced the rights of women in Mongolian society.
There was no one epiphanic moment when Genghis Khan acquired his genius for warfare, his extraordinary ability to attract the loyalty of his followers. This was a man who learned from hard experience, who adapted effortlessly to ever-changing circumstances across an unforgiving landscape. Genghis Khan was an utterly pragmatic leader whose skills developed, ultimately, out of his mastery of the horse. He was the greatest conqueror in history, a warrior of remarkable ability, but he ultimately owed a great deal of his success to the horse and to the mounted warfare it enabled (see sidebar “Archers and Horses on the Move”).
Archers and Horses on the Move
The entire Mongol military system, developed in large part by Genghis Khan, depended on obedience, strict discipline, and the horse. Mongol armies combined their brilliant skill on horseback with firepower, shock tactics, and superior mobility. Their ways of waging war were sophisticated by the standards of the day, relying on not only aggression on the battlefield, but also what today we would call psychological warfare. Their ability to cover ground fast enabled them to gather intelligence over wide areas, which they combined with the masterly use of false rumors about impending attacks or raids. Genghis Khan and his generals relied on fear as a powerful strategic weapon. In this they were very successful. The mere word
Mongol
was enough to conjure up visions of charging horsemen and brutal killing. Cities surrendered and paid tribute rather than suffer a Mongol attack. A carefully cultivated reputation for terror combined with an aura of invincibility lay behind many of the Mongol conquests.
Figure 12.2
 Modern-day Mongolian horsemen reenacting a calvary charge. © Rick Sammon.
A warrior stayed with the same unit permanently, but the leaders were given considerable latitude in the field. This highly flexible command structure allowed the Mongols to attack as a large group or, at a moment's notice, divide into units as small as ten men, in order to encircle an enemy or hunt down fugitives. Each Mongol soldier maintained between three and five horses, which allowed him to change mounts and travel at high speed for long periods without exhausting his animals. When invading Hungary in 1241, the Mongols, led by grandsons of Genghis Khan, covered as much as 160 kilometers (100 miles) a day, an unheard-of mobility for a Western army. Both horses and warriors lived off the land, the latter often off mare's milk, which added to the flexibility and effectiveness of units large and small.
Consummate horsemanship and close relationships between horse and rider came from lifetimes spent on horseback, and from constant practice. Every warrior wore a long, heavy coat under lamellar armor made up of dozens of small, hardened leather-and-iron plates sewn to a fur lining and attached at the waist with a leather belt. A sword, dagger, and sometimes an axe hung from the belt. Underneath was a heavy silk undergarment. Everyone wore trousers on horseback, and a steel or leather helmet. The primary weapon was a recurved bow made from wood, horn, and sinew that was relatively small but extremely powerful. Each archer typically carried two or three bows, each with a range of more than 2,000 meters (6,600 feet). The archers could routinely hit a target at a range of 1,500 meters (4,920 feet). Combine powerful bows, expert archery, and the speed and mobility of horses ridden by men who could shoot multiple arrows at a gallop, and you had one of the most successful animal-human relationships in history.
The close ties between warrior and steed were an integral part of battlefield tactics. Mongol leaders never engaged in the wasteful mass frontal assaults commonplace in the European and Near Eastern worlds. Instead, they used diversionary attacks to encourage the enemy to stay in place, and then sought to outflank and encircle them. The archers would lay down withering barrages of arrows, rearming themselves from baggage camels that followed them into battle. If an attack was unsuccessful, the Mongols would withdraw, quietly study the enemy's tactics, and then attack later. Sometimes they would rely on a feigned retreat, appearing to withdraw in confusion, and then wheeling around to the attack without notice. Once again, expert horsemanship and complete trust between human and beast were essential. Horses and archers forged empires, conquered established civilizations, and toppled emperors.
The Mongol empire depended heavily on horses. Every tribe, every army, engaged in a constant gavotte between people, their animals, and droughts or cold snaps that could kill hundreds of animals in a few months. Horses cut travel times across the harsh steppe, expanded territorial boundaries by a factor of five, and allowed people to exploit widely distributed raw materials and grazing grounds. But every temperature change and rainfall shift altered the relationship. Drier periods brought stunted pasture, decimated herds, and led to extended searches for grass and water. Inevitably, warfare increased as tribes encroached on one another's territories. In milder, better-watered years, territories became smaller, the carrying capacity of grazing land improved dramatically, and fighting died down. Those who lived on the fringes of the steppe lived in constant fear of drought years, when fierce nomads driving animals would arrive without warning, creating mayhem from horseback as they sought better pasture.
The endless rhythms of warm and cold, plentiful rain and drought, ample grass and no forage, were a major engine of history in Eurasia, dictated in large part by a close relationship with the horse. When drought on the plains coincided with unrest and brilliant generalship by the likes of Genghis Khan, the foundations of history shookâall because, thousands of years in the past, some bold young men dared jump on the back of recently tamed horses and ride them. Genghis Khan was well aware of the vulnerability of his domains. He tried to
move his empire away from its dependence on the horse and the irregular cycles of drought and rainfall that governed life on the steppe. In this, he and his successors were at least partially successful.
Toppling an Emperor
Genghis Khan started his conquest of China with small-scale raids across the Huang He River. In 1209 he accepted the surrender of Emperor Li Anquan of Western Xia. Two years later, he declared war on China's Jin Dynasty, crossed the Great Wall, and ravaged northern China. He captured Beijing in 1215. A grandson, Kublai Khan (who reigned 1260â1294), completed his conquest. Born the year Genghis captured Beijing, he was largely brought up by his mother, the remarkable Sorghaghtani Beki, who “trained all her sons so well that they marveled at her powers of administration.”
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Genghis Khan's eldest son, Mongke, became great khan, and gave his brother responsibility for China. Sorghaghtani Beki made sure that Kublai understood that the best way to govern the Chinese was by enlisting their support, thereby acquiring revenue from their rich farmlands. The Mongols already controlled northern China, so her son's first task was to conquer Sung-controlled, densely forested southern China. There was a stalemate until 1253, when Kublai captured Dali and outflanked the Sung army.
Kublai was elected great khan in 1260, at a time when disunity had descended on the Mongol Empire. He promptly moved his capital to Beijing and declared himself emperor of China, despite competition from the southern Sung, who were not finally defeated until 1279. There was no way the Mongols could govern China, so he allowed the Chinese to administer themselves under Mongol supervision. There was a huge cultural gap between Mongol and Chinese, so Kublai and his successors maintained strong ties with the steppe and also relied on foreigners to control the bureaucracy. He also strove to improve communications. Fifty thousand horses, thousands of oxen and mules, four thousand carts, and six thousand boats connected fourteen hundred postal stations. Couriers on horseback wore bells that warned of their approach
and the need for a replacement mount. Such men could cover 400 kilometers (250 miles) in a day.
Mongol rule deteriorated rapidly after Kublai Khan's death in 1294, a victim of perennial clashes between pro-Chinese and steppe-oriented factions. The Ming emperors, who restored the Chinese imperial tradition in 1368, suffered from just as many equine shortages as their predecessors. By the fifteenth century, they were importing ten thousand head annually and continued to do so for over a hundred years. Their trading partners were usually uncooperative. The Mongols often sent only gelded and well-used ponies between four and eight years of age, preferring to keep the mares for themselves. The few females that did come south were apparently crossed with donkeys to produce mules for pack and draft purposes, a telling commentary on Chinese priorities. They were, after all, predominantly farmers, who left little space for pasture. Even when the military reserved areas for grazing horses, the people complained that the reserves were depriving farmers of their livelihood. Inevitably, the largest grazing areas were close to the northern borders, where raids were a constant problem.
A profound ambivalence surrounded Chinese attitudes toward horses. They became a military essential, but many authorities assumed that soldiers were unaccustomed to riding.
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Some of them were indeed superb horsemen, but one gets the impression that riding horses was considered a foreign practice, except along the northern and western borders. Chinese art is revealing, for many of those who handled and tended horses appear to be non-Chinese. There was bureaucratic attention certainly, an organization set up to acquire horses, but the entire operation over many centuries appears to have lacked true passion. Many Chinese cavalrymen never seem to have acquired a close relationship with their beasts either in the face of Mongol invasions or in later centuries. Apparently, they never mastered the true art of managing and riding horses, or of fighting with them; so, inevitably, the nomads of the north conquered them. Never did the importance of a close partnership between human and beast have greater significance.
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Someone once described camels as horses created by committee. They had a point, for they can carry double the load of an ox at twice the speed and cover much greater distances. They are faster than donkeys and can travel for long distances without water across searing hot terrain. Few animals had a more profound effect on history.