18 Chapter Oneand again, in periods of peace and population growth, fields would
creep out into the grasslands, until some new military-political up
heaval brought new raiding, new destruction, and a local return to
pastoralism.
Recurrent ebb and flow of the boundaries between plowing peas
ants and herding pastoralists accordingly took place within rather
broad regions of the Middle East and eastern Europe for more than
two thousand years, between 900 B.C. and A.D. 1350. On the whole,
the military advantage that cavalry tactics conferred upon nomads
during this long period meant that pastoral land use tended to expand,
while agricultural exploitation of the soil always halted considerably
short of its climatic limits.
In the Far East, the monsoon pattern of rainfall created a sharper
transition between farmland and grassland. Moreover, the relatively
high returns that intensive Chinese methods of cultivation got from
the loess soil of the semiarid northern provinces was so much superior
to anything which pasturage could bring in from the same landscape
that the reestablishment of cultivation in that frontier zone of China
seems to have occurred relatively rapidly each time nomad raiding
disrupted agricultural occupation of the loess soils.^17
Geographical and socioeconomic factors were assisted in defining
the oscillating equilibrium between nomad tribesmen and settled
agriculturalists by a further change in weapons-systems, not so far-
reaching as those previously referred to but important enough to
transform patterns of social structure in much of western Asia and
most of Europe. Between the sixth and first centuries B.C., Iranian
landowners and warriors developed a large, powerful breed of horse
capable of carrying an armored man^18 on its back. Such horses were
often protected by some sort of metaled garment to ward off arrows.
So burdened, they could not keep up with the steppe ponies’ unim
peded canter. Still, a force of armored cavalrymen at least partially
arrow-proof, and itself capable of offensive action with either bow or
lance, constituted a far more effective form of local self-defense
against steppe raiders than civilized lands had previously been able to
- Nevertheless, peasants were uprooted from most of the loess soils of north China
at least twice. Mongol raids of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries and nomad
attacks in the centuries after the collapse of the Han Dynasty in the third century A.D.
were severe enough and prolonged enough to destroy agricultural settlement in wide
districts of north China—or so imperfect population statistics suggest. Cf. Ping-ti Ho,
Studies in the Population of China, 1368–1933 (Cambridge, Mass., 1959), and Hans
Bielenstein, “The Census of China during the Period 2–742 A.D.,” Museum of Far
Eastern Antiquities, Stockholm, Bulletin 19 (1947): 125–63. - Assyrian bas-reliefs show cavalrymen with metaled corselets. As in so many other
military matters, the Assyrians seem to have pioneered armored cavalry too.