Social and Political Background

The Mongols were never a single, uniform people. They were a diverse body of groups bound together by language, with ties stretching east to the Tatars, Khitan and Manchus, and west to the Turkic tribes. Within this broad family, two distinct ways of life existed: pastoralism and hunting-gathering.

The pastoralists were the more prominent group. They herded horses and sheep primarily, with cattle, goats and camels playing a lesser role. Their world was the Central Asian steppe, in the region of the modern state of Mongolia. It was a majestic landscape of wide horizons and rolling plains, ringed by the snow-capped Altai mountains to the west and the arid Gobi desert to the south. The Onon and Selenga rivers, along with countless springs fed by melting snow from the northern and western hills, drained the land. In a good season, the region offered lush pasture and considerable small game.

The hunter-gatherers lived a humbler existence to the north, in the Siberian forests beyond the Onon river plain. They survived by trapping animals in the summer months and trading the furs they collected.

The entire region suffered from extremes of temperature — harsh, long winters followed by brief, dry summers. Agriculture was possible in the pastoral regions for short parts of the year, but the Mongols, unlike some of the Turks further west, never took to farming. Neither the pastoral nor the hunting-gathering economy could sustain dense populations, and so the region had no cities. The Mongols lived in tents called gers, moving with their herds between winter and summer pastures.

Ethnic and language ties united the Mongol people, but scarce resources shaped their society in a very specific way. Society was divided into patrilineal lineages. The richer families were larger, owned more animals and pasture land, and therefore attracted more followers and wielded greater influence in local politics.

Periodic natural calamities — unusually harsh winters that exhausted game and stored provisions, or droughts that parched the grasslands — would force families to forage further afield. This led to conflict over pasture lands and predatory raids in search of livestock. Groups of families would occasionally ally around richer, more powerful lineages for offensive and defensive purposes, but these confederacies were usually small and short-lived.

The scale of Genghis Khan's confederation of Mongol and Turkish tribes was perhaps matched only by the one Attila had stitched together in the fifth century. But there was a crucial difference. Attila's system died with him; Genghis Khan's political system was far more durable and survived its founder. It proved stable enough to counter larger armies with superior equipment in China, Iran and eastern Europe. As the Mongols established control over these regions, they found themselves administering complex agrarian economies and urban settlements — sedentary societies quite distant from their own social experience and habitat.

Yet the nomadic and agrarian worlds were hardly foreign to each other. The scant resources of the steppe drove the Mongols and other Central Asian nomads to trade and barter with their sedentary neighbours in China. This was mutually beneficial: agricultural produce and iron utensils from China were exchanged for horses, furs and game from the steppe.

Commerce, however, was never free of tension. Both groups unhesitatingly applied military pressure to enhance profit. When the Mongol lineages allied, they could force their Chinese neighbours to offer better terms, and trade ties were sometimes discarded in favour of outright plunder. When the Mongols were in disarray, the Chinese would confidently assert their influence in the steppe. …