28 chapter one
of speed and numbers. Such advantages were of course only possible thanks
to the horse, the quintessential military transport at the time.91 once they
emerged from their accustomed territory and crossed large stretches of arid
or cultivated land, neither with sufficient grazing, in search of plunder, the
nomad cavalry had to rise to the unceasing, unsparing task of finding fod-
der for their steeds in the settled lands. the difficulty of meeting this need
increased daily, proportionately with the number of horses in a campaign.
though the chinggisid military superpower kept the pastoral economy of
the eurasian steppe well supplied, the solution to this logistical problem
nevertheless largely depended on the Mongol armies’ ability to strike hard
and move fast in a hostile environment.92
From this perspective, chinggis Khan and his descendants were unique
in the scale and ambition of their attempt to bridge the gulf that had divided
the nomadic and settled populations of the vast eurasian habitat for mil-
lennia. the weakness of forces dependent on grazing land was a perma-
nent problem that followed the invaders wherever they went outside of the
steppe, with some local variation. We already encounter it in the Mongol
case during chinggis Khan’s own day.
When the Mongol generals around Ögödei suggested turning all of north-
ern china into pastureland, by killing or deporting the inhabitants, razing
their settlements to the ground and letting the arable ground go to seed,
this was not an expression of mindless barbarism but rather a response to
the strategic need to secure a green corridor to carry the imperial cavalry
onward to the Southern lands ruled by the Song dynasty.93
the invaders found the huge stretches of land without sufficient grazing
in central asia, Iran and the near east equally unwelcoming. the Western
drive of their conquests ran into delays from the very start, in a foretaste
91 napoleon used to say that his great victories had been won by the boots of his soldiers.
evidently, the hooves of the Mongol horse were equally important in empire-building.
92 Sinor, “horse,” opened important lines of enquiry on the subject and its general
effects on Mongol power, without following through the implications in a systematic
fashion.
93 Yeh’lü chʼu-tsʼai, one of the khanʼs advisers, brought convincing economic arguments
against such a radical project, using quantitative data to persuade his lord and master of
the material advantages which the Mongols could continue to draw from their chinese
subjects by means of a more moderate, well-organised system of exploitation (Grousset,
Empire, p. 315, allsen, Imperialism, p. 159). It seems that such considerations saved north-
ern china from becoming a mere extension of the Mongolian biotope. the Mongol mili-
tary point of view would however be vindicated dramatically by future events: when the
great khan Möngke crossed the territories, he lost so many horses to lack of fodder that
he ordered a further 80,000 mounts to be brought from the northern parts of his domain
to make up the numbers (Jūzjānī/raverty, II, pp. 1215–1223).