The Huns played an instrumental part in destroying the Western Roman Empire, the Avars brought
the Eastern Roman Empire to almost the same fate, the Khazars stopped Arab expansion across
the Caucasus while in the process drastically weakening the Umayyad Caliphate, and the Nomads
of the Mongol Steppe were such a threat to China that numerous Chinese dynasties all
across the ages spent enormous amounts of resources on large wall building projects
just to keep the Nomads out.
It is undeniable that the early medieval nomads of the Eurasian Steppe had a tremendous impact
on Euroasian history and, therefore, it would be nice to know how these nomads lived in
the steppe, especially since a lot of what we know about them isn’t very accurate.
Before we delve into the complicated life of the early medieval Euroasian steppe quote
unquote “nomads”, we have to talk about the polities that existed in the steppe during
this time just to give some background.
We will start off in the 6th century with the First Turkic Khaganate.
There were many nomadic polities before then but we have to start off somewhere and the
First Turkic Khaganate is a perfect starting point as it gave rise to many nomadic groups
that influenced Eurasian politics for the rest of the medieval period.
The First Turkic Khaganate emerged after the Gokturks, an early Turkic tribe, successfully
rebelled against their Rouran overlords and took control of their state in 552.
Subsequently Gokturks went on to conquer much of the Euroasian steppe.
The Gokturks came as far as the Byzantine controlled Crimea in 576 and even laid siege
to the city of Chersonesus, today’s Sewastopol.
The Avars that came to Pannonia during the 6th century and established the Avar Khaganate
were fleeing from the Gokturk conquest.
There is a theory that the Avars were the Rouran that were defeated by the Gokturks
and fled west, however, this is hard to prove.
The Avars could have easily been one of the many nomadic tribes in the steppe that just
didn’t want to get conquered by the First Turkic Khaganate.
Nonetheless, wherever they came from, the Avars, along the way to Pannonia, subdued
the Bulgar tribes living around the Don river.
In c. 584 a succession crisis in the First Turkic Khaganate led to a civil war which
lasted until 603 when the civil war got resolved by splitting the Khaganate into two.
The Western Turkic Khaganate and the Eastern Turkic Khaganate.
The Eastern Turkic Khaganate was then subdued by the Tang Dynasty in 630 becoming their
vassals.
In the west the Bulgars rebelled against the Avars in 632 establishing the Old Great Bulgaria.
During that time with the fall of the Eastern Turkic Khaganate, the Western Turkic Khaganate
wasn’t fairing any better and in around the 630s it started to lose control over the
various nomadic tribes living within its borders, the most notable of these tribes were the
Khazars.
The Khazars broke off from the control of the Western Turkic Khaganate at some point
between 630 and 650 consolidating power south of the Volga river.
Once they emerged as a consolidated polity they started to look outwards trying to conquer
the Bulgars to the West, the Kangar Union to the East and also fighting the Arabs to
the south.
The Kangar Union was a collection of various nomadic tribes that, under the leadership
of the Kangars, rebelled against the Western Turkic Khaganate when it was invaded and subdued
by the Tang dynasty in 657.
In 668 after the death of their Khagan the Old Great Bulgaria finally succumbed to the
Khazars with some of the Bulgars migrating North and Establishing Volga Bulgaria and
some migrating west and establishing the First Bulgarian Kingdom.
In 682 the Gokturks of the Eastern Turkic Khaganate, who were the vassals of the Tang,
successfully rebelled against the Chinese and started to consolidate power in the steppe
once again.
In 712 they conquered what remained of the Western Turkic Khaganate, which was now called
the Turgesh Khaganate as the Turgesh took control of the Khaganate away from the Gokturks.
With this conquest of the Turgesh Khaganate the Gokturks of the Eastern Turkic Khaganate
formed what we call today the Second Turkic Khaganate.
During the formation of the Second Turkic Khaganate the Gokturks violently subdued a
nomadic tribe called the Uyghurs who subsequently started to plot against them.
Also around the late 7th century the Umayyad forces took control of the Amu and Syr darya
rivers away from the Kangar Union and in the early 8th century the Arabs came into conflict
with the Tang Empire over the valuable trading area of Sogdia.
This fighting was marked with frequent involvement of the various local nomadic tribes from the
Second Turkic Khaganate, most notably the Turgesh and the Oghuz.
In 744 the Uyghurs, now with new allies, led a rebellion against the Gokturks and overthrew
them ending the Second Turkic Khaganate.
Subsequently the Uyghurs established a new nomadic polity known as the Uyghur Khaganate.
As part of consolidating power within this new Khaganate the Uyghurs attacked one of
their allies that helped them overthrow the Gokturks, the Karluks.
After this attack the Karluks migrated west to the land of the Oghuz and the Turgesh who
they defeated and took control of their land.
The Turgesh assimilated into the Karluks while the defeated Oghuz had no choice but to migrate
west into the Kangar Union.
There the Oghuz allied with the Kimaks, who were under Kangar control, and overthrew the
Kangars.
The defeated Kangars united with the remaining tribes still loyal to them and formed a new
tribe called the Pechenegs.
The Pechenegs subsequently migrated westwards fighting off the Khazars and settling around
the Ural river.
The victorious Oghuz and Kimaks then divided the Kangar lands and formed their own polities
in the area in c. 750.
These polities were called the Kimak Khaganate and the Oghuz Yabgu State.
Oghuz also managed to reconquer some parts of the Syr Darya river from the Arabs and
the Uyghurs managed to get hold of some Sogdian trading cities.
This is where I will end the VERY oversimplified summary of the early medieval Euroasian Steppe.
Keep in mind that the sources about this area and this period are very sparse and, therefore,
the details of these events are very much still debated today by historians.
Due to that some historians may present slightly different versions of events that occurred
in this area during this time, specially when it comes to territorial control of the various
polities mentioned as that is probably one of the hardest things to pinpoint.
With that said, now that you’re more confused than ever about the history of the Euroasian
steppe, we can delve into the lifestyles of the people that lived in this land of constant
flux.
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Now that we have discussed the various steppe polities of the early medieval Period and
the way they were established and destroyed we can discuss more closely the life of the
steppe “nomads” that lived in these polities.
When people picture the history of the Eurasian steppe they often picture an endless sea of
grasslands filled with nomads living in yurts that sporadically follow their animal herds
wherever they happen to migrate.
These nomads then intermittently formed into bigger political groups and marched into the
civilized world where they caused chaos and destruction.
This picture, however, is filled with stereotypes and isn’t very accurate.
The nomads of the Eurasian steppe could build up or destroy powerful empires, they could
form complex social hierarchies and even build cities the splendour of which impressed their
local “sedentary” counterparts.
None of this could be done by a society which solely centred around herding and migrating.
The early medieval nomadic societies of the Euroasian steppe were far more complex than
is often talked about.
Probably the most important thing to mention here, is that the Eurasian Steppe in the early
medieval period did have urban centres or at least settlements.
Of course, these were on average smaller than the urban centres of China or Persia and there
were less of them, but they did exist.
The Euroasian steppe was not some kind of a sea of neverending grasslands with no farming
or settlements or urban centres.
The trading cities on the Syr Darya river are well documented, as are the Khazar trading
cities on the Volga and Don, and the Uyghur capital was said to have been so magnificent
it could rival any city in the “urbanized” world.
Even in today’s northern Kazakhstan, an area believed to have been devoid of any urbanization,
a 9th century Arab explorer Tamim ibn Bahr wrote of Kimak “villages and cultivated
tracts of land” around the Irtysh river.
As you can see the early medieval Euroasian steppe contained settled people who farmed
and also urban centres that produced goods, materials and traded with the rest of the
world.
Yes, there most certainly were a majority of nomads in the steppe that did live a life
dictated by sporadic seasonal migrations of their herds, but this was by far not the only
lifestyle present in the steppe nor was this lifestyle static for the people that lived
it.
By that I mean the nomads weren’t always nomadic.
People who lived a nomadic life in the steppe could and did embrace a sedentary lifestyle
either by choice or when social, economic, and political pressures forced them into it.
For example, the Khazars found themselves in control of the extremely valuable Volga
and Don river trade routes and to consolidate control over this trade they constructed and
settled in cities along the rivers.
The Khazars were nomads who, forced by political and economic pressures, had to consolidate
power by becoming, at least in part, sedentary.
This is not to say that all Khazars became sedentary, for example the Khazar ruling class
was said to have only wintered in their capital of Atil, and there were Khazar people that
did continue on herding in the Southern Russia Steppe, but it does go to show that nomads
could and did sometimes embrace sedentary lifestyles.
In contrast to that, settled people in the steppe, who might have been former nomads
themselves, could also abandon a settled or an urban life and become nomads again.
This happened when a Gokturk Khagan of the Second Turkic Khaganate attacked the Uyghurs.
He stated that “I marched down along the Selenga river and there laid waste to their
[Uyghur] settlements.”
further stating that Uyghurs dispersed mostly east but also west.
The Uyghur settlements were destroyed and so the Uyghurs had to go back to a nomadic
life in the steppe, biding their time and finding new allies before attacking the Gokturks
and destroying their Khaganate as we already talked about.
Hopefully with these examples it has become clear that a nomadic steppe life wasn’t
stagnant, it could involve months, years or even generations of sedentary existence before
reverting back to nomadic herding, or vice versa.
The nomads of the Euroasian steppe were not foreign to the idea of farming or settling
in an urban centre.
They were also aware that successfully running a polity required some sort of centralized
leadership, administration, and management.
This is why when new nomadic polities came to be, like that of the Khazar or Uyghur Khaganate,
the nomads knew they had to construct cities and so they did.
However, this centralization, urbanization, and settlement was not always successful or
welcomed by some members of the nomadic communities within newly formed polities.
For example there was a very prominent Gokturk general in the Second Turkic Khaganate, called
Tonyukuk, who vehemently believed that “the only way for them (the nomadic Turks) to maintain
their national identity was ‘to follow the water and the grass’ (meaning a nomadic
lifestyle) and have no permanent dwellings.
If the Turks were to change their old customs, he argued, one day they would be defeated
and annexed by the Chinese.”
Thanks to people like Tonyukuk we know that the idea of a nomadic life vs a settled life
was a subject of debate in nomadic communities.
Therefore, as with almost everything, the nomadic life of the Eurasian steppe was a
spectrum with people on one side arguing for a settled life and urban centres and people
on the other for a nomadic life.
Most nomads most likely fell somewhere in between these two extremes.
Which is why we see a variety of lifestyles in the Eurasian steppe, and why a nomadic
life was fluid and could contain nomads settling in cities and then also due to a variety of
reasons abandoning these cities and becoming nomads again.
Another aspect of the Euroasian steppe nomads that is often misrepresented is their autarky,
in other words their self-sufficiency.
The nomads of the Eurasian steppe were not at all autarkic.
On the contrary, they needed a steady stream of goods like pottery or silk and raw materials
like iron or wood from sedentary societies.
The nomads simply just couldn’t get hold of, or produce, all these goods in big enough
quantities and therefore relied on sedentary societies.
There were several ways the nomads acquired these goods and materials from these sedentary
societies.
First was from the urban centres that already existed in the Eurasian steppe, in fact one
of the theories for why there were settlements in the Eurasian steppe is that they were created
to fulfill an economic need.
This is, however, still debated.
Second way of getting these goods and materials was through just trading, this is partly why
nomads were often so keen on exploiting trade routes like the Khazars did and why they often
tried to conquer areas significant for trading, like the Silk Road.
Third was raiding urban centres, or through coercion of tribute payments of goods and
materials to not raid these urban centres, pretty self explanatory.
Fourth was conquering sedentary societies and then exploiting them, kind of like the
Avars did with the Slavs, or the Uyghurs with the Sogdians.
Lastly, fifth, was nomads building their own urban centres and producing their own goods
and materials.
Most notable example of this was the Uyghur capital of Ordu-Baliq which was reported by
arab explorers in the 9th century as being “a great city, rich in agriculture and surrounded
by districts full of cultivation and villages lying close together.
The city has twelve iron gates of huge size.
The city is also populous and thickly crowded and has markets and various traders.”
Through archaeology we can also gleam that the city had sizable hinterlands which focused
on production of goods most certainly to fulfil the needs of the nomadic polity.
Of course, none of these five ways of acquiring goods and materials were mutually exclusive
and all these solutions were used interchangeably by various nomadic groups.
With all that said, there’s a very good reason why when it comes to the Euroasian
steppe nomads the “nomadic” aspect of their life is often overemphasized by people
talking about their history.
This mostly happens because the nomadic life is what made the nomads so unique and it is
the thing that gave them the edge over their sedentary counterparts.
Their lifestyle was the reason why the Euroasian nomads were time and time again so influential
in Euroasian history.
The nomadic lifestyle forced the people of the steppe to become very good at horse riding,
archery, and be self-sufficient for long periods of time.
As discussed they still needed goods and materials from sedentary people but they could live
without these things for far longer than any other sedentary people could.
All these skills which the nomads learned in the steppe coincidentally also made them
skilled and efficient warriors.
They were perfect soldiers for military campaigns as they could mobilize and travers great distances
in a short amount of time.
On top of that, the fact that a nomadic lifestyle required the involvement of everyone in the
nomadic society meant that despite smaller population numbers the nomads of the Euroasian
steppe could field just as large armies as their much more populous sedentary neighbors.
Almost everyone in the nomadic society could be a skilled warrior if needed.
Therefore, it was the nomadic lifestyle that empowered the Euroasian nomads to be so influential
in Euroasian history and that is why their “nomadic” life is often emphasized in
most literature about them which, however, overshadows the more nuanced reality.
The reality being that most early medieval Euroasian nomads did live a nomadic life which
however, was not self-sufficient, not stagnant, and not devoid of farming or urban centres
as is often thought.
Just as any people the nomads were pragmatic and when needed they could settle and farm
or build cities to centralize power or abandon all this and start herding again.