The Era of Chinese Predominance. 1000–1500 59slave soldiers in the service of civilized rulers before seizing power in
their own right.^71
The enhancement of nomad military power through interpenetra
tion with civilized societies climaxed in the thirteenth century. Gen
ghis Khan (r. 1206–27) united almost all the steppe peoples into one
single command structure. His army was also arranged on a decimal
system, led at each level (10s, 100s, 1,000s) by persons who had
earned the right to command by success in the field. As this formida
ble and expansible army (defeated steppe enemies were simply folded
into the structure, starting at the bottom as common soldiers) pen
etrated civilized ground in north China and central Asia, the Mongol
commanders took over any and every new form of weaponry they
encountered. Thus they brought Chinese explosives into Hungary in
the campaign of 1241, and used Moslem siege engines in China—
more powerful than any the Chinese had yet seen—in the campaigns
of 1268–73 against the southern Sung. Similarly, as we have already
noticed, Kublai Khan first annexed and then transformed the southern
Sung navy into an oceanic fleet in order to launch attacks on Japan and
other lands overseas.
Yet the enormous successes that came to Mongol arms in the thir
teenth century carried their own unique nemesis. As had happened
before to other steppe conquerors, after two or three generations the
comforts and delectations of civilization undermined the hardihood
and military cohesion of Mongol garrisons. This was normal and to be
expected, and led to the eviction of the Mongol soldiery from all of
China in 1371. In western Asia and Russia, Mongols were not driven
out but instead dissolved into the numerically superior Turkish
speaking warrior population of the western steppe after the end of the
thirteenth century, when subordination to the Great Khan in Peking
ceased to have even ritual significance.
But on top of this normal pattern whereby steppe conquerors were
partly absorbed and partly repulsed by civilized communities, two
accidental by-products of the Mongol empire of Asia radically
weakened steppe peoples vis-à-vis their civilized neighbors. One was
the demographic disaster to Eurasian nomads that resulted from the
arrival of the plague, known in European history as the Black Death
- For the Kitan as representative of a new “generation” of nomad society see
Gernet, Le monde chinois, p. 308; for Middle Eastern slave soldiers see Patricia Crone,
Slaves on Horses: The Evolution of the Islamic Polity (New York, 1980); Daniel Pipes, Slave
Soldiers and Islam: The Genesis of a Military System (New Haven, 1981).