The modern period: the age of decadence

The waning of nomadic military power

When headed by capable leaders, well-trained and disciplined mounted troops were almost invincible. The sedentary civilizations could not, by their very nature, put aside for breeding purposes pastures sufficiently large to sustain a cavalry force that could equal that of the pastoral nomads. Hence the military superiority of the nomads remained a constant for about 2,000 years of Eurasian history.

At its highest degree of development, Central Asian nomad society constituted a very sophisticated and highly specialized social and economic structure, advanced but also highly vulnerable because of its specialization and the lack of diversification of its economy. Geared almost entirely to the production of war matériel—i.e., the horse—when not engaged in warfare, it was unable to provide the people with anything but the barest necessities of life. To ensure their very existence, Central Asian empires had to wage war and obtain through raids or tribute the commodities they could not produce. When, owing to circumstances such as severe weather decimating the horse herds or inept leadership, raids against other peoples became impossible, the typical Central Asian nomad state had to disintegrate to allow its population to fend for itself and secure the necessities for a subsistence. Hunting and pastoral nomadism both needed vast expanses to support a thinly scattered population that did not naturally lend itself to strong, centralized political control. The skill of a Central Asian leader consisted precisely in the gathering of such dispersed populations and in providing for them on a level higher than they had been accustomed to. There was but one way to achieve this: successful raids on other, preferably richer, peoples. The military machinery was dependent on numbers, which then precluded self-sufficiency. In case of prolonged military reverses, the nomadic aggregation of warriors had to disband because it was only in dispersion that they could be economically autonomous without recourse to war.

In the course of the 15th century, the steppe territory suitable for great horse herds began to shrink. In the east the Yongle emperor of the Ming led five major campaigns against the Mongols (1410–24), all successful but none decisive. Yet when, under the leadership of Esen Taiji (1439–55), the Mongol Oirat pushed as far as Beijing, they found the city defended by cannon, and they withdrew. In the Middle East, as noted above, the Ottoman and Safavid gunpowder empires barred the road to the no-longer-invincible nomad cavalry, and, along the western borders of Central Asia, the Russians were soon to start on their decisive and irresistible march across Central Asia to the borders of China, India, and Iran.

The Russian conquests

The most spectacular advance of the Russians into Central Asia carried them eastward through the forest belt, where the hunting and fishing populations offered little resistance and where the much-coveted furs of Siberia could be found in abundance. Acting on behalf of the Stroganov family of entrepreneurs, in 1578 or 1581 the Cossack Yermak Timofeyevich crossed the Urals and defeated the Shaybanid prince Kuchum, who alone represented organized political power in Siberia.

The Russian advance from west to east across Siberia, motivated by commercial rather than political considerations, remains unparalleled in history for its rapidity. The native Finno-Ugrians—Samoyed or Tungus hunters accustomed to paying their fur tribute—were little concerned with the nationality of the tax collectors and found it no more unpleasant to deal with the Russians than with Turks or Mongols. Russian penetration was marked by the building of small forts, such as Tobolsk (1587) near the former capital of Kuchum, Tara (1594) on the Irtysh River, and Narym (1596) on the upper Ob River. The Yenisey was reached in 1619, and the town of Yakutsk on the Lena River was founded in 1632. About 1639 the first small group of Russians reached the Pacific Ocean in the neighbourhood of present-day Okhotsk. About 10 years later, Anadyrsk was founded on the shores of the Bering Sea, and, by the end of the century, the Kamchatka Peninsula was annexed. When advanced Russian parties reached the Amur River about the mid-17th century, they entered the Chinese sphere of interest. Although some clashes occurred, restraint on both sides led to the signing of the treaties of Nerchinsk (1689) and Kyakhta (1727), which remained in force until 1858. To this day, the border delineated at Kyakhta has not been altered substantially.

The thorniest question to be dealt with in the early Russo-Chinese negotiations concerned the Mongols—wedged between the two Great Powers—who, in the course of the 16th and 17th centuries, reasserted their control over most of the steppe belt. In the 15th century the western Mongols, or Oirat, had become quite powerful under Esen Taiji, but, under the strong leadership of Dayan Khan (ruled 1470–1543) and his grandson Altan Khan (1543–83), the eastern Mongols—more precisely the Khalkha tribe—gained ascendancy. In 1552 Altan took possession of what was left of Karakorum, the old Mongol capital. Altan’s reign saw the conversion of a great many Mongols to the tenets of the Dge-lugs-pa (Yellow Hat) sect of Tibetan Buddhism, a religion that, until the 1920s, played a major role in Mongol life. The attempts of Ligdan Khan (1604–34) to unite the various Mongol tribes failed not only because of internal dissensions but also on account of the rising power of the Manchu, to whom he was forced to surrender. The active Central Asian policy of China’s Qing dynasty brought a lasting transformation in the political structure of the region.

More distant from China, the Oirat could pursue a more independent course. One of their tribes, the Dzungars, under the leadership of Galdan (Dga’-ldan; 1676–97), created a powerful state that remained a serious menace to China until 1757, when the Qianlong emperor defeated their last ruler, Amursana, and thus put an end to the last independent Mongol state prior to the creation, in 1921, of Outer Mongolia (the Khalkha princes had submitted to the Manchu in 1691).

The treaties of Nerchinsk and Kyakhta established the northern border of the Chinese zone of influence, which included Mongolia. In the wars against the Dzungars, the Chinese established their rule over East Turkistan and Dzungaria. China’s western boundary remained undefined, but it ran farther west than it does in the present day and included Lake Balkhash and parts of the Kazakh steppe.

Wedged between the Russian and Chinese empires, unable to break through the stagnant but solid Ottoman and Safavid barriers, the Turkic nomads of the steppe lying east of the Volga and the Caspian Sea and south of Russian-occupied Siberia found themselves caught in a trap from which there was no escape. If there is cause for surprise, it lies in the lateness rather than in the fact of the ultimate Russian conquest.

West of the Uzbek khanates, between the Aral and Caspian seas, were the nomad Turkmen, notorious robbers who roamed the inhospitable land. The Kazakhs, who during the 17th century divided into three “hordes,” roamed between the Volga and the Irtysh. During the 16th and 17th centuries they fought Oirat and Dzungars but succeeded in holding their own, and in 1771 Ablai, ruler of the “Middle Horde,” located west of Lake Balkhash, was confirmed as ruler by both China and Russia. Yet Russian expansion, motivated by the urge to get closer to the Indian Ocean, forced the Kazakhs to yield. Although some Kazakh leaders, such as the sultan Kinesary, put up spirited resistance (1837–47), the line of the Syr Darya was reached by the Russians toward the middle of the 19th century.

The Uzbek khanate of Kokand was annexed in 1876; those of Khiva and Bukhara became Russian protectorates in 1873 and 1868, respectively. The conquest of the Turkmen in the last quarter of the 19th century defined Russia’s (now Turkmenistan’s) southern frontier with Iran and Afghanistan.