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Alternative historiography of the Mongol Empire

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The alternative historiographical current on the history of the Mongol Empire is a revisionist (without pejorative connotation, in the strict sense) historiographical movement born around the 2010s under the impetus of several historians studying the history of this empire, and the Eurasian steppe more generally. Although in the minority, it is gaining more and more importance and calls into question the classic historiography on this subject, which would be tinged according to this new current of Eurocentrism and colonialism coming from the fact that it is based on the works 19th century Westerners like Henry Sumner Maine or Lewis Henry Morgan.

This revisionism proposes a new interpretation of this history, based in particular on more accurate translations of medieval sources, to which more importance is given, and a rejection of what Christopher Atwood calls secret history fundamentalism, in reference to Secret History of the Mongols. The works forming this current are based on onomastics, philology, anthropology, ethnology, and history, all over at least eighteen centuries.

The main scientists involved are David Sneath (Professor of Anthropology of Inner Asia and Director of the Mongolia and Inner Asia Studies Unit (MIASU) at the University of Cambridge).[1], Christopher Atwood (Professor of Mongolian and Chinese Frontier and Ethnic History at the University of Pennsylvania)[2], Lhamsuren Munkh-Erdene (professor of history and anthropology at the National University of Mongolia)[3], Stephen Pow (history researcher at St. Petersburg State University)[4] and Simon Berger (doctor in history and civilizations graduated from the School for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences, researcher at the Center for Research on the Iranian World (CeRMI), the CNRS mixed research unit 8041)[5]

According to these studies, the nomads of the Central Asian steppe are throughout the ages much more politically structured and aware of their common history than was supposed, and their history would be very different from that which we know .

Summary of classical historiography[edit]

To understand the major differences between these studies and the classic historiography of the subject, we need to summarize the latter.

In it, Central Asian nomads live without a social structure other than the tribe[6] (the use of this word is important), the anthropological definition of which is a "society organized on the basis of kinship ties, especially families having the same ancestry. Thus, several family clans living on the same territory can form a tribe[7]. The social bonds and common identity of these societies would therefore be based on kinship[6], and not on territory as in sedentary societies.[8][9] According to Lewis Henry Morgan, this would result in tribes organized as “units of descent” around a common ancestor, themselves divided into family clans. This society is therefore dominated by the figure of the leader, who reigns thanks to the law of the strongest and the loot that he must provide to his warriors, since they, nomads, are free to go wherever they want. To support their predatory culture, they therefore rely on sedentary people.[6][8] Because, according to Nicola di Cosmo's "needy theory", nomads need goods that they do not produce themselves and that they therefore seek from sedentary people, such as agricultural products, as their mode of migratory life does not allow to produce them.[10] This predatory nature and violent society would naturally be imposed by the harshness of the steppe, as would the nomadic lifestyle.[8] This also prevents the political structuring into a state, allowing at most temporary "confederations of tribes".[11][12][13][7][14][15] Nikolay Kradin thus describes the Mongolian empire as a "supercomplex chiefdom".

The arrival to power of Chinggis Khaan therefore takes on a providential character (we even sometimes speak of the "Chinggisid revolution"), that of a man coming to unify the peoples of the steppe to put an end to the tribal chaos which reigned there by creating an empire steppes and an army organized according to a new decimal system (military units organized on a 10/100/1000/10000 model in which the members of the different tribes are mixed to assimilate them all and put an end to clan divisions, with iron discipline[16]) which makes it possible to effectively use the violent habits of these peoples[17][8][18][19]. But this is ultimately only temporary, and the Mongols end up settling and assimilating with the local populations, perpetuating the cycle that already existed with previous empires created by nomads, like the Jürchens who founded the Jin dynasty for example.[20] This cycle can therefore be summarized as follows:

  1. An empire, at least a centralized state populated by sedentary people, exists. On its outskirts live disunited and weak nomads.
  2. The dynasty ruling this empire weakens, becomes corrupt, its power declines.
  3. Among the nomads a leader emerges who manages to unite the different tribes.
  4. The nomadic horde sweeps over the weakened empire, seizes power and establishes a new dynasty.
  5. The nomads who had recently invaded the empire settled down and assimilated with their subjects.[8]

And it repeats itself.[21][22][13][15][14]

These theories are old: as early as the 14th century, Ibn Khaldun spoke of them in what he called the Asabiyya[23]. René Grousset develops a similar thesis in his book "L'Empire des steppes" (The Steppe Empire), which is today a reference on the history of this region of the world.[24][25][26]

The revisions carried out by these studies[edit]

Criticisms of this vision of history appeared in the 2000s.

Against the tribal system[edit]

David Sneath, in his book The Headless State, published in 2007, is the first to oppose the commonly accepted vision of things, in their anthropological aspect for his part since he is himself an anthropologist. For him, the tribe simply does not exist, and the political system of the steppe nomads is no less close to the modern state than the medieval kingdoms, which in fact have many points in common with it: their borders were not much more precise (for example, in the Holy Roman Empire, certain territories paid homage to other monarchs, such as the king of France), while it was not the sovereigns but local aristocrats who exercised many powers over their subjects, such as taxation and justice, with the king only coming to direct these same aristocrats. He argues that the use of the term tribe to describe nomadic societies developed in the numerous 19th-century translations of medieval texts. In these sources, the Latin term rex is used indiscriminately to speak of nomadic and sedentary heads of state, but is translated from this time into tribal chief among the Mongols while it is translated into king for the sovereigns of Europe. For him, these translation choices are part of a colonialist desire to assert Western civilizational superiority over the rest of the world.[9]

Also in Chinese sources of the time, the historians do not see any trace of the tribe. However, there is the Chinese term buzu, used to designate the aristocracies of nomadic societies, and which can be translated as "lineage, family, group of descendants", which seems to go in this direction. But Christopher Atwood argues that this term was created by the Chinese during the Later Tang to legitimize the ruling dynasty (from a Turkic nomadic people, the Shatuo) among its Confucian Han subjects, who found that the nomads did not grant not enough importance to their lineage. Furthermore, this term only applies to the aristocracy of this people who found themselves ruling in northern China, otherwise all members of the Shatuo people would have been considered members of the Later Tang dynasty, since according to tribal model they would all be descendants of a common ancestor. However, in the same way that we can use the term "Merovingians" to speak of all the Franks led by the monarchs of this dynasty, the subjects of the nomadic peoples also took as their identity the name of their ruling lineage, and from here comes the temptation to see the tribal model.[13] Christopher Atwood concludes that according to him "The idea of ​​a 'kinship-based' society, invented in Europe to explain how these societies were radically different from those of civilized societies, was invented in China to show how societies barbarians were actually quite similar to the civilized empires of China."[27] Finally, he points out that the Chinese also used the same term, both to designate nomadic and sedentary states, guo.[11][28]

A problem, which appeared later, according to him, is that the "tribalization" of the translations of these Latin, Persian, Arabic and Chinese sources led historians working from these translations to think that the authors of this period, often sedentary, had a pejorative view of nomads. As a result, the Secret History of the Mongols, written in Mongolian, appeared to be the most objective source, and was considered to have more value than the contemporary sources[29], hence what Christopher Atwood calls it “secret history fundamentalism.” The problem being that this is a work of propaganda written after the death of Chinggis Khaan.[30][31][32]

Nomadic territorial organization according to these studies[edit]

They defend the idea that, contrary to widespread belief, nomads did not roam freely in the steppe. The territory on which they grazed their herds, nuntuq in Mongolian, was precisely demarcated by the aqsaqal, "white beards" according to a literal translation, a term which in truth had more to do with social status than with age. These people would come from the same families, and would form an elite in the steppe. Indeed, they alone would have knowledge of the distribution of water points and seasonal pastures, the regeneration cycles of the latter, etc., and they would therefore have had command of the camps and the power to allocate pastures to their subjects. Subjects who therefore had to nomadize on a given and limited territory, and not freely either, since their movements were guided by the needs of their herds. These aristocrats would therefore in fact own more or less large territories, like the lords of medieval Europe, on which their subjects would have to pay taxes, where they would impose corvées and enforce the law.[33] The sovereign, with his encampment, ordered in Mongol which gave horde, would nomadize in a more political way, to monitor his subjects and his aristocracy.

Simon Berger says:

"There was a real territoriality of the nomads of the steppe, in which the nomads took root. It is therefore the very notion of nomadism which would undoubtedly need to be called into question, or at least nuanced."

This territoriality would not be specific to the Mongols of this period, and we find quite similar systems among all the nomadic peoples of the Eurasian steppe, from Ukraine to Manchuria and from Siberia to Afghanistan, but also throughout of history, before and after the Mongol Empire. According to David Sneath, these entities could not be continuous or centralized and not have a capital or a sovereign for example, but had the characteristics of a state, with codes of law, courts and judges to enforce them, a hierarchical social order and conscription.[24][9]

The political system of nomads according to Simon Berger[edit]

In his thesis “An army in the guise of a people.” The military structure of the political and social organization of Eurasian nomads through the medieval Mongolian example", the historian describes this system as "military-administrative". He offers a completely new vision of what is called the "Mongolian decimal system". Some historians not taking part in this revisionnism had already pointed out the fact that this system had already existed since Antiquity among the nomads.[26] However, each time we found this system in an empire/confederation nomad, its establishment was attributed to the founder of the empire, as if each time the system was lost. After research, he concluded that there was in reality a great socio-political continuity among the different nomadic entities which have succeeded one another in the steppe over the centuries.

"Several characteristics of the Mongol imperial system are indeed found within the empires which preceded it in the Eurasian steppe, first and foremost its military organization and the role played by the army in the state apparatus. This is one of the essential markers of a nomadic political culture identifiable over the long term. In particular, three distinctive features of the nomadic military institution are found insistently on the scale of several centuries: a rational organization of army, firstly on the basis of a decimal system, secondly in two wings or two wings and a center, and thirdly the existence of a guard of elite soldiers around the sovereign. These three elements are not systematically present simultaneously , but are however recurrent within the nomadic formations that historiography has described as "imperial". Examination of the sources allows us to note, however, that this recurrence is not limited to the latter, and that we are therefore dealing with to a constitutive aspect of the political order of nomads in general." Une armée en guise de peuple, 2022[24]

Decimal system[edit]

However, we find in the sources units comprising a non-decimal number of soldiers, or units of the same rank categorized as lower or higher, for example tümen (unit of 10,000 men normally) of 30,000 men or mingghad (unit of 1000 men normally) of 500 soldiers.[34][35] Furthermore, it is the mobilization of men which is at the origin of these units, which the sources describe as applying even to those from subject peoples, both sedentary and nomadic[36]. However, an empire cannot function with 50% of its adult population going to war.[13] These two elements can therefore question the quality of this system, which is nevertheless praised as having enabled the Mongol conquests.

But Simon Berger draws attention to the fact that according to him the sources describe this system as incorporating the entire population, and not just men, in addition to being permanent[37]. For him, the decimal system is therefore not a simple order of battle but rather an administration governing the entire society of the empire, and the Mongolian army is not simply a military force but an administration. Each unit is assigned to a territory, which its members cannot leave freely. The mingghan, a unit of a thousand, would have been the basis of this system, the scale at which the State exercised its prerogatives (taxes, corvées), the tümen (unit of 10,000) being more reserved for a warlike context. Hence the fact that it is 95 mingghad that we are talking about when we talk about the size of the Mongol population at the time of the enthronement of Temüdjin in Chinggis Khaan in 1206. The noyan at the head of these units were appointed by the sovereign himself. The historian then specifies what really made up these units according to him:

"A tümen was a military-administrative unit forming a community of households sufficiently numerous and economically robust to contain within it ten thousand men mobilized for war, [...] the same was obviously true at the lower levels." Une armée en guise de peuple, 2022[24]

These men would be registered on the Kökö Debter, "blue registers" in Mongolian, and when they were mobilized, which was not the case for all at the same time in a large unit, their families accompanied them to the war. But these units would also have more soldiers than the numerical value which defined them: they would have at least three times as many. Already, because each soldier should be accompanied by an auxiliary, equivalent to a valet-at-arms or a Western page, generally a young brother, son, or servant, responsible among other things for leading the reserve horses but also other tasks relating to logistics. And what's more, because for each soldier there would also be a sort of reservist, kötöchi, who was not part of the order of battle because he was used to replenish the strength of weakened units or to create new armies, this cannot be done by taking soldiers or auxiliaries from already existing units, otherwise the entire system would be disorganized. Finally,

"Not only was it expected that within a household there would be next to a registered soldier a son or a brother as well as a kötöchi, three men in total, but also additional sons, brothers and kötöchin were considered "excess" in relation to these three, who therefore really constituted a registered military center. These excess men made it possible to form new troops, in which this tripartition was reproduced, the additional kötöchin becoming those of the sons or brothers to the basis of new military centers. This also means that three thousand or thirty thousand adult or adolescent men in a mingghan or tümen was a minimum, and that there could sometimes be even more." Une armée en guise de peuple, 2022 [24]

By adding the families and these unregistered men, and taking into account the demographics of the households at the time, Simon Berger estimates that a tümen would have an average total number of between 120,000 and 150,000 people. Thanks to this system, new armies could easily be created by duplicating already existing units, and the annexation of territories would be done with ease. There would therefore be found the source of the power which allowed the Mongol invasions, and the origin of the terror which they aroused: their armies were fast and autonomous due to the accompaniment of families and the "carry" of their administrative and economic system, while the replacement of men killed by reservists seemed to reflect infinite numbers.

All of this would explain the differences in numbers given by the sources, depending on whether they only counted soldiers or not.[24]

Organization of the army into wings and elite guard[edit]

The battlefield division of an army into a center and two wings is nothing new. However, as the army supervises the population, this pattern would, according to Simon Berger, be reproduced on the scale of the empire, as the largest subdivision of the territory. Let us first specify that this system would be oriented towards the south, the line therefore corresponding to the west and not the east. The center, considered the interior of the empire, would be the domain of the sovereign, the ordo, surrounded by two wings generally delimited by a natural geographical element (river, mountain range), the exterior of the empire . One of the two wings, called the elder (tölish), would be considered more important than the younger (tardush) and can for example be entrusted to the heir to power or is the domain of the sovereign, the interior, in the case where there is no center and only two wings. Both are split into "sub-wings", called horns or arrows, themselves divided into a mesh of decimal units led by aristocratic lineages transmitting command hereditarily. The armies of the wings would generally have been composed of populations subject to the sovereign, whilst the center was the personal army of the sovereign, his guard.[13] This guard would have been both an elite troop and in a certain way the government of the state, without distinguishing between these two roles: the titles of the officers would correspond to both a political/administrative office and to command of a unit of a certain size. The recruitment of these men would combine sons of the Mongolian or subject nobility, chosen by the monarch - which would make them a sort of hostage to keep the aristocracy calm - and commoners. On the other hand, the monarch would provide gifts and privileges to his guard to ensure his loyalty.[38]

The entire political-military organization seen here would be described and governed in the jasaq, considered by classical historiography as a code of law created by Chinngis Khan, but which would in fact be more of a kind of constitution than a legal code, and would also go back at least to the Göktürks.[22][39][24][40]

Case of the Empire's size[edit]

The Mongol Empire at its territorial peak in 1279 according to Stephen Pow

Popular consensus exists on the size of the Mongol Empire at its territorial peak, putting it at 24 million square kilometers. This makes it the largest contiguous empire in history, but the second largest when considering size alone, since the British Empire at its peak was 35.5 million square kilometers. But according to Stephen Pow, this estimated area for the Mongol Empire is based on an arbitrary northern border, along a perfectly straight line, cutting Siberia horizontally. He states that it is improbable that a medieval state could have drawn such a straight border, and that the available sources establish that northern Siberia was controlled by the Mongols. By adding these territories to the area of ​​the Empire, he obtains a size of 36.5 million square kilometers, making the Mongol Empire the largest in history.[41][32]

Media coverage of these studies[edit]

In France, the YouTube channel Hérodot'com has produced a series on this trend, with for the moment (February 2024) three episodes and a fourth and fifth planned for the future, after being contacted by Simon Berger following videos during which he relied on the classic historiography of the subject.[32][38][40]

References[edit]

  1. ↑ Searle, Dorothy (2015-09-10). "Professor David Sneath". www.socanth.cam.ac.uk. Retrieved 2024-04-10.
  2. ↑ "Christopher P. Atwood | East Asian Languages and Civilizations". ealc.sas.upenn.edu. Retrieved 2024-04-10.
  3. ↑ "Munkh-Erdene Lkhamsuren". www.eth.mpg.de. Retrieved 2024-04-10.
  4. ↑ "Stephen Pow". ResearchGate.
  5. ↑ "Simon Berger". CETOBaC (in français). Retrieved 2024-04-10.
  6. ↑ 6.0 6.1 6.2 Atwood, Christopher (2004). Encyclopedia of Mongolia and the Mongol Empire. Search this book on
  7. ↑ 7.0 7.1 Allsen, Thomas (1994). "The rise of the Mongolian empire and Mongolian rule in north China". The Cambridge History of China: Volume 6: Alien Regimes and Border States, 907–1368. Cambridge University Press. pp. 321–413. doi:10.1017/CHOL9780521243315.006. ISBN 978-1-139-05474-4. Search this book on
  8. ↑ 8.0 8.1 8.2 8.3 8.4 Blin, Arnaud (2016). La Fin des Empires [The End of Empires] (in français). Éditions Perrin. p. 141. ISBN 978-2262069681. Search this book on
  9. ↑ 9.0 9.1 9.2 Sneath, David (2007). The Headless State: Aristocratic Orders, Kinship Society, and Misrepresentations of Nomadic Inner Asia. Columbia University Press. ISBN 978-0231140546. Search this book on
  10. ↑ Di Cosmo, Nicola (1994). "Ancient Inner Asian Nomads: Their Economic Basis and Its Significance in Chinese History". 53. JSTOR 2059235.
  11. ↑ 11.0 11.1 Munkh-Erdene, Lhamsuren (2011). "Where Did the Mongol Empire Come From Medieval? Mongol Ideas of People, State and Empire". ResearchGate.
  12. ↑ Blin, Arnaud (2021). Les conquérants de la steppe D'Attila au khanat de Crimée [The conquerors of the steppe From Attila to the Crimean Khanate] (in français). Search this book on
  13. ↑ 13.0 13.1 13.2 13.3 13.4 Berger, Simon (2019). "L'Empire mongol : un État nomade". Académia.edu.
  14. ↑ 14.0 14.1 SCHILTZ, Véronique. "EMPIRE DES STEPPES". Encyclopædia Universalis.
  15. ↑ 15.0 15.1 AUBIN, Françoise; ELISSEFF, Vadim. "MONGOLIE, histoire". Encyclopædia Universalis.
  16. ↑ Chaliant, Gérard (2005). "VI. l'Empire mongol". Guerres et civilisations [Wars and civilizations]. Hors collection (in français). Odile Jacob. pp. 245–259. ISBN 978-2-7381-1646-8. Search this book on
  17. ↑ Man, John (2007). Genghis Khan: Life, Death, and Resurrection. Macmillan. ISBN 978-0312366247. Search this book on
  18. ↑ Blin, Arnaud (2020). "5". Les grands capitaines [The great captains]. Tempus (in français). Éditions Perrin. pp. 189–218. ISBN 978-2-262-09405-8. Search this book on
  19. ↑ GOURDON, Vincent. "UNIFICATION MONGOLE PAR GENGIS KHAN" [MONGOL UNIFICATION BY GENGIS KHAN]. Encyclopædia Universalis (in français).
  20. ↑ Grousset, René (1944). Le Conquérant du Monde [The Conqueror of the World] (in français). Search this book on
  21. ↑ Jackson, Peter (2017). The Mongols and the Islamic World: From Conquest to Conversion. Yale University Press. ISBN 978-0-300-12533-7. JSTOR j.ctt1n2tvq0. Search this book on
  22. ↑ 22.0 22.1 Hoang, Michel (1988). Genghis Khan. Fayard. Search this book on
  23. ↑ Martinez-Gros, Gabriel (2021). De l'autre côté des croisades, L'Islam entre croisés et Mongols [On the other side of the Crusades, Islam between Crusaders and Mongols] (in français). Passés Composés. ISBN 978-2-37933-390-3. Search this book on
  24. ↑ 24.0 24.1 24.2 24.3 24.4 24.5 24.6 Berger, Simon (2022). ""Une armée en guise de peuple" La structure militaire de l'organisation politique et sociale des nomades eurasiatiques au travers de l'exemple mongol médiéval" ["An army in the guise of a people" The military structure of the political and social organization of Eurasian nomads through the medieval Mongolian example] (pdf). Académia.edu (in français).
  25. ↑ TVR (January 2023). "L'Empire des Steppes" [The Steppe Empire]. Éditions Les Perséides (in français).
  26. ↑ 26.0 26.1 Grousset, René (1939). L'Empire des steppes, Attila, Gengis-Khan, Tamerlan (PDF). Éditions Payot. Search this book on
  27. ↑ Atwood, Christopher. "Notion of Tribe in Medieval China: Ouyang Xiu and the Shatuo Dynastic Myth" (PDF). Miscellanea Asiatica.
  28. ↑ Munkh-Erdene, Lhamsuren (2018). "The Rise of the Chinggisid Dynasty: Pre-Modern Eurasian Political Order and Culture at a Glance". International Journal of Asian Studies. 15: 39–84. doi:10.1017/S1479591417000195.
  29. ↑ Aubin, Françoise (1989). "Genghis Khan de Michel Hoang, compte-rendu" [Genghis Khan by Michel Hoang, report]. Études Chinoises. 漢學研究 (in français). 8 (1): 143–151.
  30. ↑ Atwood, Christopher (2017). The Indictment of Ong Qaan. Search this book on
  31. ↑ Atwood, Christopher (2007). "The Date of the 'Secret History of the Mongols' Reconsidered". Journal of Song-Yuan Studies (37): 1–48. JSTOR 23496277.
  32. ↑ 32.0 32.1 32.2 Herodot'com - Les Nomades d'Asie Centrale : Tribus ou Etats ?. Retrieved 2024-04-10 – via www.youtube.com.
  33. ↑ Munkh-Erdene, Lhamsuren (2022). "Mongol State Formation and Imperial Transformation" (PDF). Académia.edu.
  34. ↑ Song, Lian. Yuan Shi. Translated by Atwood, Christopher. Search this book on
  35. ↑ ad Din, Rashid. The Compendium of Chronicles. Translated by Thackston, W. M. Search this book on
  36. ↑ de Bridra, C. Hystoria Taratrorum. Search this book on
  37. ↑ Al-Juvayni, Ata Malik (1958). Tarikh-i Jahangusha [The history of the world-conqueror]. Translated by Andrew Boyle, John. Manchester. Search this book on
  38. ↑ 38.0 38.1 Herodot'com - L'Etat Nomade d'Asie Centrale. Retrieved 2024-04-10 – via www.youtube.com.
  39. ↑ Berger, Simon (2023). "Nomadic State in the Sedentary World: The Military Mode of Government of Conquered Lands in the Mongol Empire" (PDF). Chronica (21).
  40. ↑ 40.0 40.1 Herodot'com - Le Système Décimal d'Asie Centrale. Retrieved 2024-04-10 – via www.youtube.com.
  41. ↑ Pow, Stephen. "The Mongol Empire's Northern Border: Re-evaluating the Surface Area of the Mongol Empire" (PDF). Genius Loci Laszlovszky 60.

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