(^58) Chapter Two
suitable pack animals in large numbers. In fact, it seems plausible to
say that a social alliance between urban populations and animal hus
bandmen became the backbone of Islamic society. This alliance ex
panded from its birthplace in Arabia across most of the Middle East, as
city folk were persuaded or compelled to cooperate with nomads to
exploit the grain-growing majority. As for the peasantries, they were
all but helpless, being rooted to the soil by their routines of life and
unable to achieve the mobility (or market participation) that urban and
pastoral life both came to depend upon.^70
Anticipating what occurred on the seas in the eleventh century,
linkages between steppe populations and civilized lands seem to have
crossed a critical threshold in the tenth century. Beginning about 960,
Turkish tribesmen infiltrated the central regions of the Islamic world
in such numbers as to be able to seize power in Iran and Mesopotamia.
Another Turkish people, the Pechenegs, flooded into the Ukraine in
the 970s, cutting the Russians off from Byzantium. Simultaneously,
along the northwest Chinese border a series of newly formidable
states came into existence, beginning with the Kitan empire (907–
1125).
These political events reflect the fact that in both China and the
Middle East (though not perhaps among the Pechenegs) nomad mili
tary organization and effectiveness transcended earlier tribal limits in
the tenth century. This was partly a matter of improved equipment.
Metaled corselets and helmets, for example, became commonplace
when trade with civilized societies gave nomads, like the Kitan, ac
cess to such goods in quantity. The Kitan also learned to use siege
machines—catapults and the like—thus overcoming the earlier im
potence of raiding horsemen when confronted by fortifications. But
new equipment was less important than new patterns of social and
military organization. In the course of the tenth century, civilized
models of command and military discipline took root among steppe
peoples, supplanting or at least modifying old tribal structures. The
Kitan, for example, organized their army according to a decimal sys
tem, with commanders for tens, hundreds, and so on, just as the
ancient Assyrians had done. The Turks who took power in Iran and
Mesopotamia were even more radically detribalized, having become
- On the alliance between pastoralists and city people in Islam see Xavier de
Planhol, Les fondements géographiques de l’histoire de l’Islam (Paris, 1968), pp. 21–35. On
the phenomenon in Christian Balkan society, see William H. McNeill, The Metamor
phosis of Greece since World War II (Chicago, 1978), pp. 43–50.