Empires of the Silk Road: A History of Central Eurasia From the Bronze Age to the Present (84 page)

20.
The comitatus of the early Khitan, a Mongolic people, is known from the accounts of An Lu-shan’s Rebellion. For a detailed treatment of the later Liao Dynasty of the Khitan, including discussion of its imperial guard corps, see the outstanding early study by Wittfogel and Fêng (1949). “Each [Khitan Liao] emperor had a separate
ordo,
or camp, with a ‘heart and belly guard’ of 10,000 to 20,000 households…. The members of this guard, particularly the non-Khitans, were the emperor’s private slaves, but their proximity to him gave them high status. After the emperor’s death they guarded his mausoleum while his successor recruited a new
ordo
and guard” (Atwood 2004: 297). The Liao state, with its five capitals
(ordo),
seems to have been organized, theoretically, around the ideal of the “khan and four-bey” system. The khan of the Kereit, who were rivals of Temüjin during his rise to power, “had crack forces of
ba’aturs,
‘heroes’, and a 1,000-man day guard, institutions Chinggis Khan would later imitate” (Atwood 2004: 296), along with the golden tent
(ordo)
connected to them.

21.
The text says that the men who are sacrificed are killed “so that it may not be known in which of the [twenty burial] chambers is his tomb.” A similar remark is made by the Roman who witnessed the burial of Attila. The accounts that claim those executed were killed so as to hide the location of the tomb are hardly to be believed—if even foreigners witnessed the burial (they describe it in great detail), the location of the tomb was no secret. It is certain from solid historical accounts that Central Eurasians bound by the comitatus oath did in fact commit suicide (they were even eager to do so) or were ritually executed, in order to be buried with their lord (Beckwith 1984a).

22.
The Byzantine imperial comitatus, created circa 840, was called the
Hetaireia
and “consisted of three subgroupings, one of which was largely composed of Khazar and Farghânian (
) mercenaries” (Golden 2004: 283–284). Cf. Constantin Zuckerman, cited by de la Vaissière (2005a: 285 n. 82) and Dunlop (1954: 219). The T’ang emperor T’ai-tsung, who had defeated the Eastern Türk and adopted the title Tängri Kaghan, took many Turkic warriors into the imperial guards. That these were not simply ordinary Chinese-style guards, at least in the minds of the men themselves, is clear from the fact that when he died, his two leading Turkic generals requested permission to commit suicide to be buried with him (Beckwith 1984a: 33–34).

23.
In references “to Činggis Qan’s own residence, especially in his ordinances concerning the Guard
(kešik)
duties, [the term
ordo ger ‘
ordo-tents’] is rendered as ‘Palace tent’…. [The] word
ordo
[is] an important term in Turkic from which it passed into Kitan, Mongolian, etc. In origin,
ordo
designated the camp of the elite cavalry guard [i.e., the comitatus] of the
qan
in the middle of which stood the qan’s tent or yurt” (de Rachewiltz 2004: 453–454).

24.
Compare the Kievan Rus
dru
ž
inniki
‘friends’ (cf. Christian 1998: 390) of the
dru
ž
ina,
or Slavic comitatus, the word for which is in turn cognate to Common Germanic *druhtiz ‘comitatus’, from (traditional) PIE *dhereugh (Lindow 1976: 17–18), that is, PIE *dereug. Old English
gedryht,
the usual word in
Beowulf
for the comitatus (which is also widely referred to as
weored ~ weorod ~ werod)
develops the general meaning ‘army’ and then simply ‘group of men, band’ in later Old English (Lindow 1975: 24–26).

25.
This comitatus, which survived him
(TCTC
220: 7047), was called
i-luo-ho
NMan
yì-luò-hé,
which in “the language of the Hu” means “the strong warriors (
)”
(TCTC
216: 6905). This term represents *yerlak Χa in the archaic northern dialect pronunciation of Middle Chinese, corresponding to Mongol
erlik qaghan
‘ruler of the underworld’, a loan from Turkic; cf. Old Turkic
ärklig khan,
literally ‘mighty lord’, an epithet for the ruler of the underworld (Clauson 1967: 224). In view of the transcription
*Χa (q.v. Takata 1988: 304) for *qa (i.e., Kha) ‘Khan’, this would seem to be a Khitan (Mongolic) form; cf. the well attested Middle Mongol form
qa
‘Khan’ (de Rachewiltz 2004: 457, 521, and his references). Although in T’ang contexts the word
Hu is most frequently used for ‘Indo-Europeans’—not merely ‘Iranians from Central Asia’, as usually believed (e.g., Pulleyblank 1991: 126–127), but even Indians in India—it also refers to Uighurs, Mongols, and others on the northern frontier (and in earlier times to the Hsiung-nu and their neighbors as far east as Manchuria); the expression ‘the language of the Hu’ can thus refer to Khitan, Old Turkic, Sogdian, or another language spoken in the area at that time. Moribe appears to have missed the earlier citation (see above in this note) and thus in his otherwise valuable discussion of
châkars
in China during the An Lu-shan Rebellion he mistakes
i-luo-ho
for an ethnic name (Moribe 2005: 244). An’s rebel troops are also referred to as
zhejie (che-chieh)—châkar
s—according to de la Vaissière (2003). Cf. his article on Sogdian
châkars
in China (de la Vais-sière 2005c). It is argued at length by de la Vaissière (2007) that the attested examples of the comitatus among Central Eurasians other than Sogdians are references either to Sogdians or to systems unrelated to the
châkar
institution found among the Sogdians. While it is undoubtedly the case that whatever the Sogdians were doing was not
identical
to whatever the Turks, or the Germanic peoples, or the Tibetans, etc., were doing at the same time, and for the same purposes, one does not need or expect to find total identity in cultural elements even within one ethnolinguistic group. It is understood that the Franks, the Tibetans, the Mongols, and so on had systems different from the Sogdians’
châkar
system, but they were all merely local variant forms of the comitatus, one of the central elements of the Central Eurasian Culture Complex. Unfortunately, the present book had already gone into production before I learned from him that his previously forthcoming monograph had actually appeared, so I was unable to do more than skim quickly through it and add this and one other brief comment. I hope I have not misconstrued his position.

26.
The official Chinese histories claim that during the golden age of Emperor Hsüan-tsung (sometimes called Ming Huang, the ‘Brilliant Emperor’) the price of a horse was only one piece of silk. This has been taken at face value both by Chinese historians of the time and by scholars ever since. The official histories seem to have been purged of data on actual commercial transactions that would contradict this particular claim; that is, they suppress the actual prices involved in order to give Hsüan-tsung credit for impossibly cheap horses and to maintain the official pretense that after his time the Turks’ horses were weak and emaciated, the nomads forced the Chinese to buy horses from them, and the Chinese overpaid the Turks in excellent Chinese silks. Nevertheless, some data survived; see Beckwith (1991). By contrast, much (though certainly not all) of the silks with which the Chinese paid the Turks appear to have been of low quality—and the Chinese did have a monopoly over the production of many kinds of silk.

27.
The cases Allsen (1997) and others cite of the capture of artisans and of valuable treasure as booty are good examples of what happened in warfare practically throughout Eurasia in Antiquity and the Middle Ages, not only warfare as practiced by Central Eurasians. While there does not seem to have been any significant coercion applied in the actual trading process at border markets, the obtaining of the
right
to trade was often a matter of diplomacy and involved the threat of war, just as it does today. Furthermore, all states, whether nomad-ruled or otherwise, used force or the threat of force or imprisonment to ensure payment of taxes and tribute from their subjects, just as they do today.

28.
De la Vaissière (2005a: 283 n. 73) correctly remarks that the possibility of specifically
Buddhist
architectural influence on the plan of the palace is not supportable. It is known from Arabic, Persian, and Chinese sources that the Nawbahâr was originally built as an Iranian royal palace-city, as I point out in a paragraph at the very end of my article (Beckwith 1984b: 150–151); the possibility of Buddhist influence on the plan of Nawbahâr directly (and thus indirectly on the City of Peace), suggested in parentheses in my article, was not taken out because the journal was already in production when I ran across the
Hudûd al-’Âlam
passage, which I had overlooked, and by that time the interior of the article body could not be changed (except for the parentheses, which the editors kindly added). With respect to the Buddhist details of the Naw-bahâr, my earlier interpretation (Beckwith 1984b: 148) of the name of the high, domed central building of the complex in the manuscripts of Ibn al-Faqîh,
al-Ašbat,
is erroneous and should be corrected. The name is certainly a transcription of the local form of the word
stûpa,
as suggested already by Herzfeld in 1921 (Beckwith 1984b: 159 n. 64); it should therefore be pointed so as to read
al-Istub
(’the stupa’) or the like. Although some stupas were very large and had Buddhist statues in them, as in this instance, it may well be that the great stupa, like the rest of the complex, was also originally an Iranian imperial construction having nothing at all to do with Buddhism.