Let's talk of political, institutional and legal culture of the Horde. Firstly, to understand how did the Horde impact others we need to check how it was organised
Furthermore, this case has broader significance when considering the imperiogenesis effect of the Steppe
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Let's start with a question. What are the four largest inland capital cities of Eurasia? Well, obviously, Beijing, Delhi, Tehran and Moscow. What is in common between these inland megacities that also serve as the political cities of huge empires/states?
They all four rose to prominence as the fiscal and administrative centers of nomadic conquerors, specialising on collecting taxes from the subjugated sedentary population
Moscow was a tiny and unimportant principality until princes of Moscow got the right to collect the taxes (выход) for the Horde from all the other Russian polities. We now ofc think of Muscovy as of political and military power. But at first it was just a fiscal intermediary
It is quite telling that the prince who made Moscow the most powerful Russian state was nicknamed Ivan Kalita (= the Wallet). Collecting taxes for the Horde, he got rich and purchased tons if fiefs. Yes, at first Moscow wasn't conquering much, it was mostly buying land for cash
Tehran was chosen as a capital of Iran by Agha Mohammad Khan Qajar. This Turcoman leader chose Tehran, because he wanted to avoid former capital Isfahan associated with the previous also Turkic and originally nomadic dynasty - the Safavids
With Delhi it's even more interesting. It was the capital of Slave Dynasty. Around 1190 Eastern Iranian ruler Muhammad Ghor sent his Turkic slave armies on the conquest of Indostan. And these slave generals indeed conquered the Indo-Ganghetic valley
Where were these slave generals garrisoned? Yildiz sat in Ghazni, Bakhtiyar Khilji in Bengal, Qabacha in Punjab. And Aibak in Delhi. In the fight for power that followed Muhammad Ghor's death Aibak won. That's the beginning of the Slave Dynasty and of the imperial ascent of Delhi
The case of Slave Dynasty where one slave succeeded to another highlights an important sociopolitical pattern - slave-elites. Bernard Lewis called it 'a peculiar social structure of Muslim society', I prefer to talk of the Inner Asian Military Bondage. But I'll cover it later
Finally, Beijing was am unimportant city until it became a capital of Inner Asian conquerors. First of Khitans, then of Jurchens, then of Mongols and finally of Manchus. To put it in other words, Beijing rose to prominence as the HQ of mounted horse archers from beyond the wall
What do these cases show? They show the imperiogenesis effect of the steppe. Those who live near the steppe will be conquered by nomads and will spend much of their history under the nomadic overlords. And these nomadic overlords tend to create very large empires
This imperiogenesis argument raises a question of how did nomadic rule impact the conquered. Russian intelligentsia traditionally ascribed Russian imperial despotism to this nomadic legacy. Kinda 'Russians were liberals, but under the Asian rule they picked up the Asian ways'
Interestingly enough very similar arguments were raised in China circa 1900. Now we find it self-obvious that the Qing Empire would just transform to Republic and then PRC keeping the same terrirory. But many of early 20th c Han nationalists would disagree
Some of them argued that China would be better off dropping the Qing conquests such as Mongolia, Xinjiang, Tibet and possibly even Manchuria and returning to the old borders of Ming empire. Basically to its Han core, limited by the Great Wall
Zhang Binglin went even further. He argued that the entire imperial structure - centralisation, bureaucracy, provincial system are the legacy of the nomads to be dropped. Instead China should break into many independent states - to break with the alien past
In the past this was casually admitted by the rulers. In 1957 Zhou Enlai, the first Prime Minister of the People's Republic of China explicitly stated that 'The extensive territory of our country today is the legacy of the Qing dynasty'.= China is so big, because it was conquered
Let's summarise. Sedentary people living by the steppe will be conquered. It's not a 'risk', it's the certainty. And they will spend much of their history within huge empires created by the nomadic conquest elites. So one effect of nomadic conquest legacy = very, very big state
What are other, may be less obvious effects? To meditate on this question, next time I will cover the political, institutional and legal culture of one specific nomadic empire - which is now a-historically called the Golden Horde. See you on Monday
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The first thing to understand about the Russian-Ukrainian war is that Russia did not plan a war. And it, most certainly, did not plan the protracted hostilities of the kind we are seeing today
This entire war is the regime change gone wrong.
Russia did not want a protracted war (no one does). It wanted to replace the government in Kyiv, put Ukraine under control and closely integrate it with Russia
(Operation Danube style)
One thing to understand is that Russia viewed Ukraine as a considerable asset. From the Russian perspective, it was a large and populous country populated by what was (again, from the Russian perspective) effectively the same people. Assimilatable, integratable, recruitable
In 1991, Moscow faced two disobedient ethnic republics: Chechnya and Tatarstan. Both were the Muslim majority autonomies that refused to sign the Federation Treaty (1992), insisting on full sovereignty. In both cases, Moscow was determined to quell them.
Still, the final outcome could not be more different. Chechnya was invaded, its towns razed to the ground, its leader assassinated. Tatarstan, on the other hand, managed to sign a favourable agreement with Moscow that lasted until Putin’s era.
The question is - why.
Retrospectively, this course of events (obliterate Chechnya, negotiate with Tatarstan) may seem predetermined. But it was not considered as such back then. For many, including many of Yeltsin’s own partisans it came as a surprise, or perhaps even as a betrayal.
The single most important thing to understand regarding the background of Napoleon Bonaparte, is that he was born in the Mediterranean. And the Mediterranean, in the words of Braudel, is a sea ringed round by mountains
We like to slice the space horizontally, in our imagination. But what we also need to do is to slice it vertically. Until very recently, projection of power (of culture, of institutions) up had been incomparably more difficult than in literally any horizontal direction.
Mountains were harsh, impenetrable. They formed a sort of “internal Siberia” in this mild region. Just a few miles away, in the coastal lowland, you had olives and vineyards. Up in the highland, you could have blizzards, and many feet of snow blocking connections with the world.
Slavonic = "Russian" religious space used to be really weird until the 16-17th cc. I mean, weird from the Western, Latin standpoint. It was not until second half of the 16th c., when the Jesuit-educated Orthodox monks from Poland-Lithuania started to rationalise & systematise it based on the Latin (Jesuit, mostly) model
One could frame the modern, rationalised Orthodoxy as a response to the Counterreformation. Because it was. The Latin world advanced, Slavonic world retreated. So, in a fuzzy borderland zone roughly encompassing what is now Ukraine-Belarus-Lithuania, the Catholic-educated Orthodox monks re-worked Orthodox institutions modeling them after the Catholic ones
By the mid-17th c. this new, Latin modeled Orthodox culture had already trickled to Muscovy. And, after the annexation of the Left Bank Ukraine in 1654, it all turned into a flood. Eventually, the Muscovite state accepted the new, Latinised Orthodoxy as the established creed, and extirpated the previous faith & the previous culture
1. This book (“What is to be done?”) has been wildly, influential in late 19-20th century Russia. It was a Gospel of the Russian revolutionary left. 2. Chinese Communists succeeded the tradition of the Russian revolutionary left, or at the very least were strongly affected by it.
3. As a red prince, Xi Jinping has apparently been well instructed in the underlying tradition of the revolutionary left and, very plausibly, studied its seminal works. 4. In this context, him having read and studied the revolutionary left gospel makes perfect sense
5. Now the thing is. The central, seminal work of the Russian revolutionary left, the book highly valued by Chairman Xi *does* count as unreadable in modern Russia, having lost its appeal and popularity long, long, long ago. 6. In modern Russia, it is seen as old fashioned and irrelevant. Something out of museum
I have always found this list a bit dubious, not to say self-contradictory:
You know what does this Huntingtonian classification remind to me? A fictional “Chinese Encyclopaedia” by an Argentinian writer Jorge Luis Borges:
Classification above sounds comical. Now why would that be? That it because it lacks a consistent classification basis. The rules of formal logic prescribe us to choose a principle (e.g. size) and hold to it.
If Jorge Borges breaks this principle, so does Samuel P. Huntington.