Kingdoms Fit for a Horse --- The course of history shifted when mounted warriors learned to subdue the foot soldiers of settled empires

 

"Raiders, Rulers, and Traders

By David Chaffetz

Norton, 448 pages, $32.50

Mention of the Silk Road transports many of us to a time of legend. We picture intrepid traders bringing to the humdrum markets of medieval Venice and Vienna never-before-seen wares from such places as the Xanadu of Kublai Khan.

David Chaffetz sees the matter rather more hardheadedly, though not without a tinge of romance. 

"What we now call the Silk Road," he writes, "should more accurately be called the Horse Road."

 In "Raiders, Rulers, and Traders," he offers a wise and jaunty chronicle of the role played by horses in the rise of empires. It was not silk but the horse, he tells us, that drew buyers and sellers to the fabled trading route that linked Europe -- by arduous caravan expeditions and flights of the imagination -- to the luscious and coveted Orient.

Mr. Chaffetz isn't suggesting that we get rid of Silk Road as our label of choice for the route first made renowned by Marco Polo in the 13th century -- the phrase is, as he says, "wonderfully evocative." But he does point out that, from around the seventh century, the Chinese Tang emperors subordinated their storied silk to the mighty horse. Desperately short of precious metal, they used silk as currency to pay for the thousands of steeds they bought from the warlike horse-breeding steppe people to China's west.

"No animal has had as profound an impact on human history as the horse," writes Mr. Chaffetz, though the tale begins in prehistory, when man domesticated the horse, learning how to ride and milk it and later mastering the art of fighting on horseback. This last feat was accomplished in the Iron Age alongside the invention of the composite (or Cupid's) bow by Scythians from Pazyryk (in the Ural Mountains), which made the mounted horse a "weapon of mass destruction." This transformed warfare and redirected the course of conquest, enabling horse-borne warriors to take on and subdue the massed foot-soldiers of settled empires.

There was a time when horse country -- today's Mongolia, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, Ukraine and Hungary -- was the center of the world. Although the steppes of Eurasia had only a fraction of the human population of the great farming civilizations of China, India and Iran, they controlled (Mr. Chaffetz tells us) half of all the world's horses. "This gave horse-breeding peoples an outsized role in history," the horse being, for centuries, a "strategic asset" that was on a par with petroleum in the 20th century.

Mr. Chaffetz weaves his tale with great descriptive verve. The "ever-increasing demand for silk needed to pay for the ever-increasing number of horses" resulted in China -- by the ninth and 10th centuries -- "struggling to recruit enough delicate female fingers" to weave the fabric. In later centuries, tea replaced silk as the currency with which the Chinese paid for their cavalry's insatiable horse-hunger.

This new mode of exchange came as a relief to China's exchequer, Mr. Chaffetz notes. Tea had the "advantage for the sellers of being consumed more quickly than silk wears out." The supply of tea bushes could be increased much more easily than mulberry trees and their silkworms, and the "horse dealers, who spent their winters in their chilly tents, welcomed this warming and stimulating beverage." 

But the horses came at the steepest price: As the steppe-dwellers "grew more and more enmeshed with the settled peoples, the ground was laid for a steppe-based empire to take over the whole world."

The foremost of these conquerors was the fearsome Mongol Genghis Khan, and the empire he established (extant from 1206 to 1368) represented "the apogee of horse-breeding rule." It extended from northern China to the western edges of modern-day Ukraine, including Afghanistan, Iran and much of what is Turkey today. Unlike the Seljuks, Khitans, Jurchens and Kipchak Turks -- steppe-based horse-breeders-cum-marauders who came before him -- Genghis never went native. His Mongol men on horseback "would not assimilate into Chinese culture." The Mongol capital remained in Mongolia, never shifting to China. His was, Mr. Chaffetz tells us in a lovely phrase, "an empire of grass," in which "pasture often served as a casus belli."

At the height of their empire, the Mongols controlled 10 million horses. Farmers' crops were often seized in harsh winters to feed their herds. "Whenever horses competed with humans for food, the horses came first." Yet a decision on farmlands may have been Genghis's biggest imperial blunder. When he overran northern China in the second decade of the 13th century, he wanted to turn every inch of farmland there into pasture for his horses. His advisers -- descended from peoples who'd once ruled over the area -- persuaded him to leave the farms alone, arguing that the taxes he'd reap would enable the purchase of more than enough feed for his cavalry. This reprieve, writes Mr. Chaffetz, "probably sealed the fate of the Mongols in China." Obliterating farmland would have killed off the conquered people, or driven them into mass exile. Instead they survived and regrouped. Had they eradicated agriculture in the region, the Mongols "might never have been evicted."

Mr. Chaffetz is a self-starting scholar, motivated by romance and personal obsessions. Retired in Lisbon after 15 years working for IBM, he writes essays on Turkey, the Arab world and the Indian subcontinent. He is the author of "A Journey Through Afghanistan" (2002), an account of his travels in that country (often on horseback) shortly before the Soviets invaded. 

The knowledge of Afghan history and culture he acquired then has stood him in good stead, shining through in his chapters on the Great Game. This is the Anglo-Russian rivalry, played out in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, in which "two European empires found themselves competing in an ancient political game over Asian horse power."

This is a charming oversimplification of a political contest that was about so much more than horses, and Mr. Chaffetz can be guilty, sometimes, of giving every human event -- battles, alliances, trade deals -- an equine interpretation. But the attraction of his book lies, also, in the same reductive audacity. Everything is about horses. The Sikh kingdom of Ranjit Singh (1780-1839), which in the 18th century encompassed all of northwest India and extended into Afghanistan, was "the last state founded in the saddle in India -- and, indeed, the world." This, notwithstanding the fact that India's maharajahs fed their horses an absurd diet of ghee (clarified butter), unrefined sugar and red chilis, "to better manage the balance of humors in the horse."

Mr. Chaffetz's cultural radar, however, is always spot on. In his chapters on horsepower in the Raj in India, he attributes the repeated failure of the British to procure the finest horses in Central Asia to their parsimoniousness. He also chides the British for their habitual disdain for Indian horse breeds, which were optimal for the local terrain, even as he concedes that some mounts may have been too small for British cavalrymen, who were taller and beefier than Indian riders.

Mr. Chaffetz's narrative features an array of horse-driven conquerors and warlords, including Attila the Hun (ca. 406-53); Timur, or Tamerlane (1336-1405), the Turco-Mongol who made Samarkand the greatest city of its time; Babur (1483-1530), the founder of the Mughal Empire in India who was descended from both Genghis and Timur; and Mikhail Skobelev, a swashbuckling (but brutal) Russian general who vanquished the Turkmen in 1881, capturing for the czar the breeding grounds of the Akhal-Teke, the most prized strain of horse in all Central Asia.

Also gripping is Mr. Chaffetz's account of Qianlong (1711-99), emperor of the Qing dynasty. His military campaign against the Oirats -- the westernmost of the Mongol horse-people -- was comparable to Napoleon's march on Moscow, with one difference. The Chinese army, comprising 150,000 mounts, took with it provisions enough for operating on the steppe for up to two years. The French, by contrast, starved, man and horse alike.

The Oirat campaign ended in what Mr. Chaffetz describes as "the first large-scale and historically attested example of genocide." The Qing spread smallpox among this ill-starred tribe, cutting down "in systematic massacres" those who didn't die of the disease. In all, a million Oirats are thought to have perished. But Qianlong got what he sought -- their lands and their horses -- in what was perhaps the cruelest episode in man's enduring association with the animal that shaped human history.

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Mr. Varadarajan, a Journal contributor, is a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and at Columbia University's Center on Capitalism and Society." [1]

1. REVIEW --- Books: Kingdoms Fit for a Horse --- The course of history shifted when mounted warriors learned to subdue the foot soldiers of settled empires. Varadarajan, Tunku.  Wall Street Journal, Eastern edition; New York, N.Y.. 27 July 2024: C.7.