Empires of the Silk Road: A History of Central Eurasia From the Bronze Age to the Present (38 page)

7

The Vikings and Cathay

The Age of Princes

After the collapse of the early medieval world order, new states appeared, but they were much smaller in size than the ones they followed. The only exception was the Byzantine Empire, which survived intact and even expanded a little, although it never recovered most of the territory it had lost to the Arabs. Perhaps because of the larger number of states, both within Central Eurasia and in the periphery, the world economy recovered and started growing again, eventually bringing cultural resurgence across Eurasia.

Unlike the Early Middle Ages, high culture in this period was primarily religious in orientation to begin with, and this determined the direction of further development. The burgeoning development of monastic institutions in all major Eurasian regions spread literacy further. At the same time, the growth of powerful monastic orders in much of Eurasia meant that the influence and control of rigid orthodoxies greatly increased too.

The cultural brilliance of the Islamic world was in the ascendant in the period following the collapse of the Arab Empire, especially in Central Asia. Virtually all of the greatest philosophers and scientists of classical Islamic civilization were either from Central Asia or of Central Asian origin. But the still young Islamic intellectual tradition came under attack by fundamentalists, who rejected philosophy in favor of mysticism and eventually succeeded in replacing reason with doctrine across the Islamic world.

While the Central Steppe continued to be dominated by nomadic peoples, the appearance in both the Western Steppe and the Eastern Steppe of states that straddled the geographical boundary between the nomadic and the non-nomadic brought increasing agrarian influence over the steppe zone. While the Viking-Slavic kaghanate of Rus expanded European agrarian-urban culture into the Western Steppe, the Chinese, under the aegis of dynasties founded by Central Eurasians, spread their agrarian-urban tradition into the Eastern Steppe.

The Formation of Small Hegemonies

Following the breakup of the great early medieval empires, and in connection with the apparent climatic downturn at that time, the peoples at the northern edge of Central Eurasia began migrating southward in a smaller-scale repeat of the Great Wandering of Peoples.

THE WESTERN STEPPE

The Khazars were threatened in the 830s by someone, probably the Hungarians (Onogurs),
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who had been their allies or subjects. They asked the Byzantines for help. Greek engineers helped the Khazars build a great fortress, Sarkel, on the lower Don in 840–841.
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The Hungarians are known to have been in the Western Steppe by 839, from which base they raided up the Danube into Pannonia in 862 and attacked the Slavs in 870–880.
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In 889
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the Khazars and Ghuzz attacked the Pechenegs in their homeland between the Volga and Ural rivers, in the western part of the Central Steppe. The Pechenegs fled into the Western Steppe, defeated the Onogurs, and occupied their territory. From the Danube basin the Hungarians again moved north into Pannonia. In 892, under Árpád (fl. 895), they allied with Arnulf, the king of East Francia, against Svatopluk, king of Moravia, and in 894 again raided in Pannonia and Moravia. With their defeat by the Bulgarians in 895, and facing Pecheneg pressure on their steppe territory, the Hungarians under Árpád settled in Pannonia, following in the footsteps of the earlier Huns and Avars. From there they raided across Central and Western Europe, generally as mercenaries or allies of one or another European prince, reaching Italy in the spring of 899.
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Their activities continued for several more decades. They eventually reached as far as Spain, in 942
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, as they concluded alliances and extracted tribute from defeated rulers wherever they went—in other words, as they built an imperial state in traditional fashion. They were finally defeated at the Battle of Lechfeld, near Augsburg, on August 10, 955,
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by their German rival Otto I (the Great, d. 973), who was in the process of building his own empire in the same way as the Hungarians. His victory over them ensured that he was to succeed at it. The Hungarians then settled down in Pannonia and established the Hungarian Kingdom. On Christmas Day of the year 1000, the Hungarian ruler Stephen was crowned king of Hungary and began the conversion of his people to Christianity.
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The Khazars were threatened from another direction as well. Although the Frankish successor states were increasingly Mediterranean in culture, the Scandinavian peoples still largely belonged to the Central Eurasian Culture Complex and constituted the northwestern most outlier of it. Like other peoples who belonged to that culture complex, the Vikings, despite their popular reputation as warriors, are now known to have been primarily traders, and they moved into the more southerly, civilized states mainly to trade. Although they are famous, or infamous, for their military actions in the British Isles and Francia via the North Sea, and settled permanently in parts of those countries, their eastern movement ultimately had greater import. They sailed the Baltic eastward into the Finnic areas and southeastward down the rivers to the lands of the Slavs west of the Khazar Kaghanate.

In the early ninth century the Vikings had become intensely involved in commerce with the Islamic lands of the Near East via the Russian rivers. This trade route had first been developed by the Khazars, Jews, and Muslims and only then came under the domination of the Vikings.
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Three Viking chiefs led by Rurik founded the Rus Kaghanate
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in the area of Novgorod around 862, and around 882 Rurik’s successor Oleg conquered Kiev and established the Rus Kaghanate as an imperial state stretching from the Baltic Sea to the Black Sea.
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Sailing west on the Black Sea, the Rus reached the Byzantine commonwealth of Orthodox states, including the Slavicized kingdom of Bulgaria, and the imperial capital of Constantinople itself. The Byzantine emperors, who had earlier acquired a comitatus of Ferghanians and Khazars,
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immediately saw the usefulness of the Vikings and hired them as mercenaries, thus constituting the famous Varangian Guard.

Via the Volga the Vikings reached the Caspian Sea and the Islamic lands across it, but they ran into conflict with the Khazars, who controlled the lower Volga basin. It was not long before war broke out between the Khazars and the Rus. Between 965 and 968/969 Sviatoslav, king of Kievan Rus, inflicted a devastating defeat upon the Khazars, capturing Sarkel and destroying the capital Atil (or Itil, on the lower Volga River) and other cities. Although the Rus returned to Kiev after their campaign and the Khazars survived as a people for a long time after their defeat,
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the Khazar realm never recovered its former power. It gradually shrank and fell prey to other foes, and the Khazar nation eventually disappeared.

WESTERN AND SOUTHERN CENTRAL ASIA

As the Arab caliphate weakened and broke up, Western Central Asia became semi-independent under a succession of hereditary governorships that ruled the region in the name of the Abbasids: the Tahirids (821–873), Saffarids (873–900), and Samanids. All were of Iranian Central Asian origin. The Samanids, whose realm was founded by Ismâ’îl (r. 893–907),
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were increasingly pressed over time by the Karakhanids, a people of Karluk Turkic stock who were based in a large territory from the Jaxartes to the T’ien Shan; they had converted to Islam in the tenth century.
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The Samanids were overthrown in 999 and the last Samanid ruler, named Ismâ’îl like the first, was killed in 1005 in the Kara Kum Desert. The Karakhanids then took control of most of Transoxiana, not including Khwarizmia, which had remained largely independent even during the heyday of the caliphate.

While the Karakhanids were expanding into Western Central Asia, the eastern territories of Southern Central Asia had come under the control of a Samanid governor, the former
ghulâm
Alptigin (Alp Tegin ‘Prince Alp’), who had established himself in Ghazne (Ghazna, in what is now southeastern Afghanistan) in or around 962 but still recognized the suzerainty of the Samanids. In 994 Sebüktigin (Sebük Tegin ‘Prince Sebük’, r. 994–997), who had formerly been Alptigin’s
ghulâm
and seems to have been a Karluk in origin, subdued a rebellion of the Samanid provinces south of the Oxus and added their territories to what had become a de facto Ghaznavid Empire. His son Maḥmûd (Maḥmûd of Ghazne, r. 997–1030) declared his independence of the Samanids. He annexed their former territories in 998 and invaded Khwârizm in 1017, adding the entire region to his empire and thereby containing the Karakhanids from further expansion to the west and south. He also expanded into northwestern India and, at the end of his life, captured northern Iran.
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After the death of Maḥmûd, the Ghaznavids rapidly lost much of their support, especially in the regions further from their home base.

At the end of the tenth century, a Turkmen (Türkmen)
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people led by Seljuk (Saljuq) migrated into the Khwarizmian region around the Jaxartes delta. Seljuk’s father had earlier served the king of the Khazars, and after his death Seljuk had been raised at his court. Seljuk’s sons bore the Old Testament–sounding names of Mûsâ (Moses), Mikâ’îl (Michael), and Isrâ’îl (Israel), which testify to their Khazar background.
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Not long after they arrived, they converted to Islam and raided the non-Muslim Turkmen and others in the region, often serving as mercenaries under one or another rival prince in Transoxiana. After being defeated by their rivals in the area in the third decade of the eleventh century they gradually began moving south into Sogdiana. Although the Seljuks were a new and largely unknown quantity in Central Asia proper, the corruption, greed, and rapid military-political decline of the Ghaznavids led city after city in Khurasan to voluntarily surrender to the Seljuks. When Sultan Mas’ûd finally decided to attack the Seljuks in force, he was decisively defeated by them in the desert west of Marw in 1040. Two years later, the Seljuks returned to Khwârizm. They overthrew their rivals and appointed a Seljuk governor over the region. The Ghaznavids retained power in their home territory around Ghazne and northwestern India, and even recovered enough strength to stave off further Seljuk expansion into their territory and temporarily pushed them back to the northwest. But under Alp Arslan (r. 1063–1072) and his son Malik Shâh (r. 1072–1092), the Seljuks secured their eastern frontier by an alliance with the western Karakhanids, whose empire had split in 1041/1042.
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To the west, the Seljuks expanded across Iran, Iraq, Armenia, and deep into Anatolia. There Alp Arslan resoundingly defeated an army of the Byzantine emperor Romanus at the Battle of Mantzikert (Malâzgird) in 1071. From this time onward Anatolia became increasingly Turkicized by the immigration of Turkmen and other Oghuz peoples who were not under the control of the Seljuks. Although Turks had earlier raided Anatolia at one time or another, Byzantine control had been firm enough that the area remained largely Greek and Armenian speaking. Now the Turkish language began to take root.