Raiders, Rulers, and Traders: The Horse and the Rise of Empires by David Chaffetz

Author:David Chaffetz [Chaffetz, David]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, Civilization, Ancient, General, Asia, China, South, India
ISBN: 9781324051473
Google: vSzXEAAAQBAJ
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Published: 2024-07-29T22:00:00+00:00

Amir Timür pursuing the Golden Horde, from a copy of the Zafarnameh, 1460.

Timür did more than provide morale-boosting spectacles. He kept his troops motivated with the promise of plunder, and, indeed, his campaign against the Golden Horde in Russia between 1391 and 1395 resulted in so much booty that his soldiers could not carry all of it back. Horse expropriation was a standard practice of Timür’s, as horses supplied their own transport, and it was a way to strengthen the army while weakening the enemy. Some who fought on foot managed to return with ten to twenty horses, representing a big jump in their social status; those who fought with a horse or two returned with a hundred. When Timür’s forces sacked Delhi in 1398, they left it a heap of ruins, and carried off the treasure that paid for remaking Samarkand into one of the wonders of the world in its time.

Timür went on to defeat and capture the eighth Ottoman sultan, Bayezid II, near Ankara in 1402, the Year of the Horse.‡ Yet following Mongol practice, Timür limited his outright conquests to territories with extensive pasture grounds, enabling him to recruit and maintain additional cavalry. Though he inflicted defeats on the Egyptian mamluks in Syria and the sultans of Delhi, he contented himself with extracting taxes from them, without annexing any of their pasture-poor territories.

Timür saw himself as the restorer of the Mongol Empire, and his victories overlapped with or exceeded those of the Mongols: Ankara, Delhi, Sarai on the Volga, and Baghdad. As ruler of Iran, he controlled one of the richest provinces of the old Mongol empire, with a cavalry force rivaling that of Genghisid Mongolia. From his homeland in Transoxiana, he could rapidly march in any direction, including across the Altai Mountains and into China. By the time of his triumphant return to Samarkand in September 1404, if anyone could claim the legacy of supreme ruler, like Genghis Khan or Kublai Khan, it would be Timür, not the newly enthroned Yongle Emperor in Beijing.

The Ming dynasty, even though it had succeeded in driving the Mongols out of China in 1368, was unable to exert control of the neighboring steppe the way the Tang had. By and large the Ming were content to strengthen and embellish the Great Wall in the form we see today, and to maintain the status quo on the steppe frontier using more diplomacy than warfare. Without a forward policy of engaging with the horse-breeding peoples, they struggled to maintain a cavalry force equal to their pretensions to collect taxes from Timür. And Timür knew this. Why, he may have asked the unhappy Ming ambassador in leg irons, should he accept Chinese suzerainty?§ What would prevent Timür from reconquering Tibet, Gansu, and Mongolia, and making the Ming his subordinate state? There is no evidence that Timür seriously contemplated invading the heartland of China—something, he also knew, that had taken Kublai Khan more than sixteen years to complete. Nevertheless, a signal defeat on

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