This piece is part of a series of articles covering the medieval and early modern great powers of each of Asia’s regions: East Asia, Central and North Asia, South Asia, Southeast Asia, and West Asia (the Middle East). Each article discusses the great power dynamics of the main powers within that particular region as well as how the main powers of each region interacted with those of other regions. To view the full series so far, click here.
Central (and Northern) Asia, sometimes also referred to as Inner Asia, is the great, amorphous, and mostly landlocked region between China, Europe, Persia, and the northern tundra of Russia. It has traditionally been characterized by a low level of urbanization, relatively little agriculture, and a lifestyle dominated by herding and nomadism, though there have been many famous cities in the region, such as Samarkand, Bukhara, and Kashgar. Nonetheless, its people have had an oversized impact on the course of human history, with groups such as the Yamnaya (Indo-Europeans), Turks, Mongols, and Manchu going on to populate much of Eurasia or founding dynasties that have ruled over much of China, India, and the Middle East.
This fact has not gone unnoticed, and influenced the British geographer Halford Mackinder’s early 20th-century Heartland Theory, which posited that the power that controlled the heartland of Eurasia would be able to shape world history. While the states that have formed in this region have generally been ephemeral, their impact on the power dynamics of the rest of the world has not been so. Historians, both medieval and modern, have always acknowledged the steppe empires as major players in Asian geopolitics.
Inner Asia has three distinct ecological belts that stretch from east to west, all of which are punctuated by mountain ranges. In the north is the taiga, or coniferous forests, which stretch from the Russian Far East and Manchuria to Scandinavia. To the south of the taiga is the steppe zone, the most distinct characteristic of Inner Asia, and what usually comes to mind when one thinks about “Central Asia.” Writing in “Genghis Khan: His Conquests, His Empire, His Legacy,” historian Frank McLynn describes many ways to envision the steppe. Some prefer to characterize it as a grassy continuum stretching from Hungary to Mongolia. Others see a dualistic model consisting of “the ‘low steppe’ comprising western Turkestan, the north Caspian and the south Russian plains, and the ‘high steppe’ consisting of eastern Turkestan and Outer and Inner Mongolia. As the names suggest, the high steppe covers the lands at an altitude between 4,500 and 15,000 feet while the low steppe terrain is at sea level.” Additionally, some envision the steppe as a “triad” consisting of a western, central, and eastern steppe, sometimes referred to as the Pontic, Kazakh, and Mongolian steppes. The nomads who ranged across Eurasia and dominated much of history came from the steppe region. Finally, south of the steppe is a large arid zone of deserts which stretch almost continuously from the Gobi Desert of China and Mongolia, through the Taklamakan, Kyzylkum, Karakum of Xinjiang, Uzbekistan, and Turkmenistan, to the deserts of central Iran and the northwestern Indian subcontinent, before meeting the Arabian and Sahara deserts. Much of this area was also dominated by nomads, as well as oasis city-states.
Compared to much of the rest of Eurasia, such as China, India, and Europe, Inner Asia, by the dint of its ecology, was sparsely populated, with one estimate placing its population at around 5 million a thousand years ago. At the time of the Mongol conquests, there may have been 2 million Mongols, as compared to 80 million Chinese, but in those times, pastoral groups were able to field sizable and capable armies. The region was never densely populated, but the domestication of the horse and herds of cattle and sheep allowed people, who had previously been small-scale farmers in river valleys, to become nomads and range across the steppe. Groups that previously were hunter-gatherers or farmers became full-time nomads and expanded across Central Asia. These groups generally originated at the two ends of the steppe, in Manchuria or Eastern Europe.
Throughout much of the ancient and classical periods, the movement of steppe nomads was from west to east, with peoples like the Yamnaya (Indo-Europeans) and Scythians — an Iranian people — fanning out across Eurasia from present-day Ukraine and Russia. Other Iranian peoples, like the Sogdians, established city-states like Samarkand and Bukhara in present-day Uzbekistan and worked as merchants and middlemen along trade routes today referred to as the “Silk Road.”
Meanwhile, the direction of conquest and migration had already shifted from east to west by the start of the medieval era. Groups of former farmers in Manchuria adopted pastoralism and spread out over Mongolia and then the Kazakh steppe, giving rise to the ancestors of the modern Mongolic and Turkic peoples. Some of the earliest nomadic empires — coalitions of tribes under a leader, a khan or khagan — formed in Mongolia, and starting with the Xiongnu in the 3rd century BCE, bore down on China. By the start of the medieval period, Central Asia was a zone dominated mostly by people originating in Eastern Eurasia — Jurchen, Mongols, Turks, Huns, Avars, among others — who had replaced the Iranian nomads and would soon also assimilate the sedentary Iranian city-dwellers of the region. They already had a long history of menacing their settled neighbors, from the Qin and Han dynasties of China — who had to build the first iteration of the Great Wall — to the Sassanids of Persia, who built another large wall, the Great Wall of Gorgan. Other groups, like the Hephthalites and Huns, invaded India and the Roman Empire, respectively.
What accounts for the success and failures of the steppe people and their empires?
By the time the greatest steppe empire of them all, the Mongol Empire, arose in the 13th century, Turkic and Mongolic peoples had dominated the region for centuries. They formed and maintained empires in ways particular to their lifestyle. Because of the quickly changing nature of tribal power dynamics, large groups could quickly come together through treaties, gift-giving, sacred oaths, exchanges of hostages, and marriage alliances. More sophisticated leaders, such as Genghis Khan, were able to organize their forces to maximize their use. He decreed “compulsory military service for all males from fifteen to seventy. He organised his 95,000-strong army in units of ten (arban), one hundred (jaghun), one thousand (minqan) and ten thousand [tumen]. Every man, woman and child…was assigned to a minqan.”
Empires that lasted long enough to rule over sedentary people for a while also implemented a dual system of governance that ruled over nomads and settled people in different ways, using the resources of the agrarian state to keep the steppe alliances together. However, steppe empires were also fragile, and needed constant influxes of wealth, and thus permanent conquest and war, to avoid infighting and fragmentation. Steppe empires were predatory in nature.
Military prowess is the other reason for the success of the peoples of the steppe. Islamic historians noted that Turkic horsemen were very mobile and could charge extremely well, carried multiple bows, and were able to shoot six arrows a minute. They shot from composite bows: bows made of multiple layers of material that allowed them to combine enormous strength — tension — with a manageable size.
They had the advantage of strong and swift horses; climatic conditions and the way land was used in China and India made it harder to breed horses in those civilizations. The enemies of the Turks in India or Byzantium did not develop horse mounted archery to fight back, and both were eventually conquered by Turkic empires, the Ghaznavids and Delhi Sultanate in India and the Seljuk and Ottomans in Anatolia.
It would be impossible to describe or even list the vast array of polities that came and went on the steppe. These evanescent entities often formed when tribes united or were conquered by some capable leader, and dissolved when circumstances changed. From the 6th century onward, a series of mostly Turkic empires dominated the steppe and fought their sedentary neighbors from Europe to China, including the Göktürks, Uyghurs, and Kyrgyz in the east near China and the Khazars, Cumans, and others in the western steppe. Some particularly interesting states arose in the 10th-12th centuries, such as the Qara Khitai, who were a Mongolic group that had founded a dynasty in northern China before fleeing to Central Asia and starting another Sinicized empire. Most other steppe groups by this time were Turkic people who had converted to Islam, marking the beginning of the association of the expansion of Islam with Turkic power. These groups included that Ghaznavids in Afghanistan, who began to raid and conquer India, the Seljuks, who conquered much of the Middle East, and fought Byzantines and Crusaders, and the Kara Khanid Khanate, who ruled over much of Turkestan and the Tarim Basin and who initiated the Turkification of much of the sedentary Iranian population.
All these people were swept away by the Mongols, who established the largest empire that the world had ever seen under Genghis Khan and his heirs. The Mongols not only united the entire steppe zone, but also conquered places as disparate as China, Persia, and Russia, completely altering the course of their histories. The nature of governance and security in Russia changed forever, with Russia embarking on a program of constant expansionism, while in Persia, some sources, no doubt exaggerating, estimated that 90 percent of the population died. While the Mongol conquests also facilitated trade and cultural exchanges, their long-term influence is also probably overstated because the unified empire soon fragmented into four successor khanates: the Ilkhanate in Iran and Iraq, the Golden Horde in Russia and the Kazakh steppe, the Chagatai Khanate in Central Asia and Xinjiang, and the Great Khanate (Yuan Dynasty) in China and Mongolia. These states were fragmented, replaced, or overthrown by other groups, sometimes native people reasserting themselves, sometimes new steppe polities. In the late 14th century, Timur, who belonged to the Turk-Mongol tradition formed a large but short-lived empire; his descendant Babur would go on to found the Mughal Empire in India. Other groups would come to power on the steppe, such as the Dzungar, Kazakhs, and Uzbek. Meanwhile, the descendants of Inner Asians, the Manchu in China, and the Turkic Safavids, Qajar, and Ottomans in Persia, Anatolia, and the Balkans would establish empires that would last until the 20th century.
But in Inner Asia itself, by the time the medieval period turned over to the early modern period, the power of the traditional steppe nomads was waning. Shifting trade patterns — the European establishment of new sea routes — and the increasing use of gunpowder would erode the commercial and military factors that had previously incentivized steppe peoples. They were too few, too poor, too decentralized to establish states that could compete against their well-populated, urbane neighbors. In the 17th and 18th centuries, a phenomenon known as the “closure of the steppe” emerged, when “the peoples of Central and Inner Asia found themselves gradually being cut off and stuck in the middle between ever-encroaching and expanding powers: to the north-west, the Russian Empire, and to the southeast…the Manchu Qing Empire.” These empires would establish clearly defined borders, integrate and settle the nomadic populations, and colonize the steppes with farmers.
But the legacy of the steppe way of politicking and the presence of an Inner Asian great power is carried forward today, arguably by Russia, which in many ways has acted like a quintessential steppe state. Long a tributary and enforcer of the Golden Horde, the expanding state of Muscovy, the predecessor of Russia, built on the legacy of the Horde to claim that it inherited the Mongols’ right to conquest — and their conquests, according to historian Marie Favereau, author of “The Horde: How the Mongols Changed the World.” For centuries, Russia has pursued a policy of constant expansion and encroachment on its neighbors — in East Asia, in the Islamic world, in Europe, just like the steppe nomads of old — often to prevent internal implosion. A great many Eurasian ethnic groups were incorporated into the Russian Empire between the 16th and 19th centuries, using the same incentive of alliances, oaths, and marital incorporation that the steppe peoples used. Russia also made use of the dual model developed by Inner Asian peoples to assimilate and rule over various disparate tribes, just like the Mongols did. By combining steppe techniques with a state containing some elements of European modernity, Russia was able to create an Inner Asian state more lasting and more powerful than most steppe empires.
Central Asian states have had an enormous impact on world history and the great power dynamics of different Eurasian regions. This is mostly due to their disruptive nature, which has reshaped and altered the course of Chinese, Islamic, Indian, and European history. Of course, visionary leaders like Genghis Khan had their own plans and strategic notions, but the fragmentary nature of the steppe empires, combined with their low economic activity and populations limited how much influence they could exert on their own without conquering the using the resources of their neighbors. Thus, much of the legacy of the steppe empires in history is through the medium of their conquests and dynasties established elsewhere, such as the Ottoman, Mughal, and Qing houses. Nonetheless, their constant pressure and interaction with their neighbors has established the steppe peoples as important geopolitical players and great powers — of a different sort — and Inner Asian empires, whether the Turks, Mongols, or Russians, as important players.