War and Peace: horse power, progress and prosperity
The man-horse miracle, from dawn to decadence
Part 2 of 2, read part 1
In 1219 AD, the largest state west of China was the Khwarezmian Empire, encompassing Iran and Central Asia. Genghis Khan had recently sent a large caravan of merchants into Khwarezmian territory to trade, establish relations and quite possibly also to spy. The Khwarezmians seized the delegation, confiscated the merchants’ goods and promptly executed them all. An enraged Khan sent three ambassadors to the Shah to protest this action: a Muslim envoy and two Mongols. The Shah was not cowed; this time he executed the Muslim and shaved the Mongols’ beards off before dispatching the pair back east. This was a grave insult, and Khan marshaled his forces to pivot westward for a strike against a foe 3,000 km away.
The Mongol invasion was rapid, and its impact was gale force. Hundreds of thousands of warriors streamed through the Dzungarian Gate, a narrow six-mile gap between the vast mountain formations that loom over Eurasia’s heart at the border between Chinese Xinjiang and Kazakhstan. A single Mongol warrior usually had at least three to five horses, rotating them as mounts to keep them all fresh. These ponies were hardy, used to foraging across the vast central Eurasian grasslands and living off the land.
Equid resources enabled the destruction of Bukhara, one of the largest cities of the day. Expecting a long campaign of drawn-out siege warfare against the numerically superior Mongols, the Khwarezmians stationed garrison troops near the frontier, toward the Ili Valley in eastern Kazakhstan. Genghis Khan, anticipating this, instead drove his forces directly through the 300 miles of the Kyzylkum desert, arriving unexpectedly at a lightly defended Bukhara in February 1220. With the inhabitants caught unprepared, the Mongols sacked the city, shocking the world with their brutality, burning the city to the ground and slaughtering all the inhabitants, save for those deemed economically valuable as slaves.
The ease of this conquest spurred Mongol general Subutai to next undertake the“Great Raid” of 1222, a grand tour of destruction which would showcase the range and effectiveness of the Mongols. Embarking from Bukhara, Subutai led 20,000 mounted warriors through northern Iran, and then up into the Caucasus, defeating the armies of the kingdom of Georgia, before exiting on the Kuban steppe, between the Black and Caspian Seas. Here, the Mongols easily dispatched a vast coalition of Alans, Circassians and Kipchak Turks, before marching north and crushing a combined force of Kievan Rus and Cuman Turks at the Battle of Khalkha. Subutai then wheeled his forces back east, raiding other Turkic tribes north of the Caspian, before returning to Central Asia. All told, it took about a year and a half and 3,500 miles for the Mongol force to sweep a great destructive arc, smashing its way through resistant armies all along the way.
Mongols are a fierce, hardy people, but the success of their conquest of Eurasia, from the Adriatic to the South China Sea, drew on a natural resource their contemporaries could only envy, a massive stock of horses. Today the Republic of Mongolia, which covers only a portion of the historical Mongolia (the remaining vast regions now enfolded within northern China’s borders), has 5 million horses for its 3.5 million humans. Despite their numerical inferiority, the ability of every nomad to ride and hunt from horseback allowed steppe nomads to mobilize every adult male for war.
And obviously, radically increased mobility is one of the key reasons humans domesticated horses and promptly conscripted them into their military conflicts. A horse’s walking speed might be equivalent to a human’s, but a trot is three or four times faster, and a horse with a rider can realistically maintain this pace for half an hour. A full gallop is 30 miles per hour, a pace that could easily be sustained for the short distances battle requires. Horses in war immediately opened up the path to international conflicts on a scale that we now take for granted. The world’s first documented battle took place at Kadesh in Syria in 1274 BC, between Egyptian forces led by Ramesses II and Hittite forces under Muwatalli II. Thousands of chariots clashed in what proved to be a stalemate, but Kadesh showed that hostilities between geographically distant great powers were now possible. An army on the hoof can move much faster than mere foot soldiers and also transport far more materiel for the campaign.