Climate in Medieval Central Eurasia Thesis Presented in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree Master of Arts in the Graduate School of The Ohio State University By Henry Misa Graduate Program in History The Ohio State University 2020 Thesis Committee Scott C. Levi, Advisor John L. Brooke 1 Copyrighted by Henry Ray Misa 2020 2 Abstract This thesis argues that the methodology of environmental history, specifically climate history, can help reinterpret the economic and political history of Central Eurasia. The introduction reviews the scholarly fields of Central Eurasian history, Environmental history and, in brief, Central Eurasian Environmental history. Section one introduces the methods of climate history and discusses the broad outlines of Central Eurasian climate in the late Holocene. Section two analyzes the rise of the Khitan and Tangut dynasties in their climatic contexts, demonstrating how they impacted Central Eurasia during this period. Section three discusses the sedentary empires of the Samanid and Ghaznavid dynasties in the context of the Medieval Climate Anomaly. Section four discusses the rise of the first Islamic Turkic empires during the late 10th and 11th century. Section five discusses the Qarakhitai and the Jurchen in the 12th century in the context of the transitional climate regime between the Medieval Quiet Period and the early Little Ice Age. The conclusion summarizes the main findings and their implications for the study of Central Eurasian Climate History. This thesis discusses both long-term and short-term time scales; in many cases small-scale political changes and complexities impacted how the long-term patterns of climate change impacted regional economies. ii Vita 2017…………………………………………..Bachelor of Arts, University of Wisconsin, Madison 2017 to present ………………………………PhD Student, Department of History, The Ohio State University Fields of Study Major Field: History v Table of Contents Abstract ............................................................................................................................... ii Vita ...................................................................................................................................... v Introduction ......................................................................................................................... 1 The Historiography of Medieval Central Eurasia ........................................................... 5 Historiographies of Climate and Environmental History ............................................. 12 Defining Central Eurasia for the purposes of environmental history ........................... 23 Central Eurasian Environmental History: the medieval Period .................................... 24 Section 1. Nature as a historical protagonist .................................................................... 38 The Methods of climate science ................................................................................... 39 The Climate history of Central Eurasia during the late Holocene ................................ 45 Section 2. The conquests of the Xixia and the Liao: economies and climate ................... 53 Khitan Political history ................................................................................................. 56 Climate during the Liao dynasty ................................................................................... 63 Tangut Political history ................................................................................................. 66 Tangut Climate and Economy ...................................................................................... 68 Reverberations across the Steppe .................................................................................. 70 Preliminary conclusions ................................................................................................ 78 Section 3. Sedentary society during the Medieval Climate Anomaly .............................. 80 Samanid Political history .............................................................................................. 80 Climate and Irrigation Agriculture ................................................................................ 82 Ghaznavid Expansion ................................................................................................... 85 Section 4. The mobile pastoralist economy and the Medieval Climate Anomaly ............ 90 Seljuk political and economic history ......................................................................... 130 An eleventh century crisis? ......................................................................................... 134 Section 5. The Qarakhitai, the Jurchen and the end of the Medieval Quiet Period ........ 141 vi Conclusion ...................................................................................................................... 153 Bibliography ................................................................................................................... 159 vii Introduction This thesis discusses the economic and political history of Central Eurasia from the ninth to the thirteenth centuries in the context of Holocene climate change and regional ecologies. Drawing on an extensive scientific literature that has just been emerging in the past ten to fifteenth years, I connect the existing scholarship on Central Eurasian history with broader discussions in climate history and environmental history. I argue that this new data — extracted from trees, lake beds, soil sediments and ice cores — helps us understand how changes in climate, as well as stable continuities in past climate regimes, impacted the long-term historical trajectory of Central Eurasia. For the short-term, I argue that each dynasty, or political system, analyzed in this thesis, interacted with their own environmental and climatic contexts in unique ways. They all faced different ecological and social problems and each found different solutions. For the long term, I argue that the transition to the Medieval Climate Anomaly (MCA, also referred to as the Medieval Quiet Period and the Medieval Warm Period) was compete as of c. 900 CE and that during the majority of the MCA Western Central Eurasia experienced drier conditions compared to the Late Antique Little Ice Age and the early modern Little Ice Age (LIA). Eastern Central Eurasia had a more complex climate history during this period, impact by both the South Asian and East Asian monsoon 1 systems. During the twelve century, climatic patterns began to shift away from the MCA regime. The disharmony between these two times scales is what makes generalizing human-environment-climate interactions so difficult. It some centuries the 9th and the 12th the two time scales connect in intriguing was. Those connections do not define the entirety of the intervening periods. This introduction acquaints the reader with the scholarly traditions that have built the fields of scholarship that I draw on in this thesis. First, I review the historiography on medieval Central Eurasia. Second, I survey the historiographies of environmental and climate history. Finally, I assess the recent scholarship on Central Eurasian environmental history. This introduction is followed by five sections and a conclusion. In section one, I review the methods of climate history. Then, I present a narrative of natural climate change in Central Eurasia during the late Holocene. This survey provides the larger framework for the detailed case studies and analysis of more traditional types of historical evidence in sections two through five. The first section operates on a long-term time scale. It offers a broad outline of the history of climate in Central Eurasia. The following sections focus on smaller time scales and evaluates questions of human-environmental interactions and symbiosis on a dynasty by dynasty basis. The second section focuses on the origins of two powerful Inner Asian dynasties, the Liao (916-1125) and the Xixia (1038-1227), and how the climatic and environmental context impacted the rise of these two dynasties. These two dynasties were selected for the starting point because they impacted the broader political history of the steppe region. I look closely at the ramifications of these two imperial expansions in a 2 broader trans-Central Eurasian discussion of climate and societal movement. In this context, I analyze the discussion of climate and mobile pastoralist1 powers in the 10th and 11th centuries, a crucial problem in Central Eurasian environmental history discussed later in this introduction. In section three, I explore the sedentary world of Transoxania and Khurasan during the Samanid (819-999) and Ghaznavid (977-1186) periods. This section provides a comparative context for the surrounding sections by analyzing how the MCA climate regime impacted the oasis and sedentary irrigation-agricultural world of Central Asia. Mobile pastoralist societies interacted with the same climatic patterns in different ways from their agricultural neighbors. Understanding how oasis societies used water and animals differently from how mobile pastoralists societies shows how political changes could have an impact on resource use. Here, I use archeological data to reconstruct human interaction with ecosystems. Khurasan is known to have been an agricultural and economic center during this period. The fourth section returns to a discussion of mobile pastoralist empires. In this section, I