INTRODUCTION: INNER ASIAN WAYS OF WARFARE IN HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVE

Nicola Di Cosmo

The military side of the "expansion of Europe" has been closely associated, especially in the writings of historians such as Geoffrey Parker, with the technological and tactical transformation of the European battlefields and fortifications known as the "military rev­ olution." Mastery of sophisticated weapons gave Europe's armies a distinct advantage that allowed them to prevail-by and large-in military confrontations against extra-European societies, perhaps slowly and accidentally at first, but rather effectively and purposefully from at least the late eighteenth century onward. Only certain areas of the world were not penetrated or dominated quite as effectively, and these are the areas identified by Halford J. Mackinder, the influential geographer, politician, and military theoretician, as the "heartland" of Eurasia, defined as the "pivot of history."' The heartland was inac­ cessible to sea-power, and yet could be easily crossed, in antiquity, by horsemen and camelmen, and later on by the railways. Mackinder recognized the historical role played by the steppes of Central Asia in military terms, and regarded Russia as the successor to the Mongols, that is, a power endowed with the same advantages and limitations as the great Eurasian empires created by the Inner Asian nomads. If, according to "pivot" theory, the larger currents of world history­ especially military history-have revolved for ages around the heart­ land of Eurasia (or Central Eurasia, or even Inner Eurasia),2 one can also say that the geopolitical rationale of this theory is not negated

1 An abridged version of Mackinder's theory has been recently reprinted in a voluminous anthology of military history: Gerard Chaliand, 1he Art ef War in World History, pp. 821-25 (Berkeley: U. of California Press, 1994). 2 The first term is closely associated with the life and work of Owen Lattimore. The second has been defined by Denis Sinor in "Central Eurasia," in Orientalism and History ed. Denis Sinor, pp. 93-119 (Bloomington, Ind., 1970; rpt. Denis Sinor, Inner Asia and its Contacts with Medieval Europe, I [London: Variorum Reprints, 1970]). The latter term is used by David Christian and explained in the Introduction to his valuable book, A History ef Russia, Central Asia, and Mongolia: Volume 1- Inner Eurasia .from Prehistory to the Mongol Empire (Oxford, 1998). 2 NICOLA DI COSMO but rather complemented by the seaborne "expansion of Europe." If the extent of the relevance of Inner Asia to modern world his­ tory can be debated, its centrality to the military history of Eurasia till pre-modern times would be hard to dispute. 3 Steppe nomads have been acknowledged as historical agents in their own right largely (but surely not uniquely) because of their military feats. At the same time, as we know, the chronicles and histories that reported such feats were written by people often placed at the receiving end of the violence the Inner Asian warriors did or could unleash. Or they were written by the nomads' literate subjects. While one might argue that such external observations are intrinsically suspect, their study across time, space, and different historiographical traditions, has yielded remarkable results. The comparative analysis of Chinese, Greek, Arabic and other sources has provided a body of elements that Inner Asian nomads shared-ranging from individual military skills to specific questions of armament, tactics and logistics-that has made ancient and modern scholars marvel at what, from the Danube to the Amur and from the Yenisei to the Amu Darya, seemed to be a single historical phenomenon that survived for mil­ lennia. The possibility of generalizing the "Eurasian steppe nomad" military paradigm across times and places has surely been the great­ est impulse, together with an interest in the dynamics of frontier societies, behind a truly Inner Asian military history, that is, a holis­ tic history of the nomadic "war machine" that did not assume the exclusive perspective of any one of the cultural spheres surrounding the heartland. A scholarly tradition of which the best-known examples probably are Rene Grousset's L'Empire des steppes and William McGovern's The Ear?J Empires ef Central Asia, sought to identify what we might call the Inner Asian "military complex" as a unique and integrated his­ torical phenomenon that, on a cyclical basis, produced overawing juggernauts able to dominate politically large expanses of Eurasia. We owe to the aforementioned study by Denis Sinor the distillation of the specific traits of the "Inner Asian warriors" through a compelling analysis of a wealth of sources from Rome to China. Among these,

3 As Denis Sinor has remarked, Inner Asia exerted influence in human history "through the excellence of its armed forces." See his "The Inner Asian Warriors," Journal of the American Oriental Society 101.2 (1981): 133.