The forum in the previous issue of Ab Imperio, “Imperial Legacies as a Resource for Nation-Building: The Case of Chinggis Khan,” demonstrated that interest in the figure of Chinggis Khan and the state he established has been increasing. To a large extent, this is related to the coming 800th anniversary of the Great Khuriltai, which in many respects determined the history of the Old World. Scholarly research in this field has been growning, old works are being republished, and conferences are being held in various countries around the world. The subject is attracting the attention of many journalists and others who engage in the writing of popular history.^[1] The 9th Congress of Mongolian Studies will be held in Ulaanbaator in August of this year, and the main focus will be “Mongolian Statehood: Its Past and Present.” It seems that the historical distance of eight centuries has not made the great Mongolian state a history, or at least “just history.” Politicians and historians alike approach the phenomenon of Chinggis Khan with the yardstick of the present-day situation: while the former search for the secret of miraculous mass (“national”) mobilization, the latter apply to the ancient polity the same categories they would use in describing any contemporary state. In this article, we would like to take stock of the explanatory models used by historians in describing the Mongol “empire” in order to see how our analytical language modernizes (and in some sense revitalizes) that ancient historical phenomenon.

AD IMPERIUM

The first important question is how and why a transcontinental empire could arise from a small nomadic people. A great variety of opinions have been expressed on this issue. They can be reduced to the following causal explanations: 1) various climatic changes (drought according to Arnold Toynbee and Grigory Grumm-Grzhimailo, and increased precipitation according to Lev Gumilev); 2) the bellicose and adventurous nature of nomads; 3) overpopulation of the steppe; 4) growth of productive forces and class struggle, and a weakening of agricultural societies due to feudal disunity (Marxist concepts); 5) the need to replenish their extensive livestock economy by raiding more stable agricultural societies; 6) reluctance of settled populations to trade with nomads (livestock surpluses that could not be sold anywhere); 7) the personal qualities of steppe society leaders; and 8) impulses of ethnic integration (passionarnost’ in Gumilev’s terminology).
Most of the factors on this list are based on rational arguments built on empirical evidence from different regions and in a different (quite recent) epoch. The significance of some of them may turn out to be exaggerated. Contemporary paleogeographic data do not confirm a strict correlation between periods of drought or increased rainfall on the steppe and the rise and decline of nomadic empires.^[2] The role of demographic factors is not entirely clear, because the growth of total livestock occurred faster than increases in population and, as a rule, caused crisis in the ecosystem. It is beyond any doubt that the nomadic way of life can contribute to the development of some bellicose qualities. But nomads were typically outnumbered by farmers, who had an ecologically more complex economy, reliable fortresses, and a more powerful artesian and metallurgical basis.
What led the Mongols and other nomads toward conquest and the formation of confederations of nomads? An outstanding American anthropologist, Owen Lattimore, who himself lived for a long time among Mongolian pastoralists, wrote that the specifics of nomadic societies cannot be correctly understood only on the basis of their internal development. Nomads can easily survive using only the products of their own livestock herds, but real nomads will always remain poor.^[3] Nomads needed the protein-rich foodstuffs produced by farmers, and they needed handicrafts, silk, weapons, and refined decorations for their leaders, wives, and concubines. All of this could be obtained either by peaceful trade with agriculturalists or by war. Both means pointed toward uniting and creating a super-tribal society.
But it is far from true that the nomadic need to establish contacts with settled and urban societies led to the creation of nomadic empires. Anatoly Khazanov showed convincingly that large nomadic societies (in reference to their early stages of development) were established due to the asymmetry in relations between nomads and settled environments.^[4] Thomas Barfield, rejecting interpretations of diffusion and of nomadic borrowing from agriculturalists, demonstrated that the level of centralization of steppe society was directly connected with the level of political integration of settled agricultural society.^[5] A complex hierarchical organization of power in the form of nomadic empires developed only after the coming of the “axial age,” when powerful agricultural world-empires were formed, and in regions that were sufficiently large for nomadic pastoralism, and where nomads had long and active contacts with more organized urban societies. The specifics of political organization in nomadic societies were largely determined by the peculiarities of regional ecology and the size of neighboring agricultural civilizations. It is not by chance that a number of publications are devoted to two different variants of adaptation by nomads to the outside world – Inner Asian (“steppe”) and Middle East (“desert”),^[6] and the distinctions of the steppe political genesis in Eastern Europe and in the east of the Eurasian continent have been persuasively demonstrated.^[7]
The synchronicity of growth and decline processes in the central Chinese plain and in the steppe, as observed by Barfield, seem to be the most important. The Han empire and the Hsiung-nu polity each appeared during a single decade. The Turkish Haganate arose just as China was united under the powerful Sui dynasty, subsequently the T’ang dynasty. In a similar way, according to Thomas Barfield, both the steppe and China had periods of anarchy within a limited time span, one after the other. When China had discord and economic crisis, the distant exploitation of nomads stopped and imperial confederations were split into separate tribes until peace and order were restored. This gives support to the general idea, expressed by Anatoly Khazanov, that the history of nomads cannot be considered separately from the history of neighboring agricultural civilizations.
The most developed thesis was expressed in terms of the world-system approach in the work of Christopher Chase-Dann and Thomas Hall. According to this methodology, in the pre-industrial period nomads as a rule occupied the semi-periphery that united different regional economies (local civilizations, world-empires) into a joint territory. The political structure of each region within its semi-periphery was in direct proportion to the size of the core. Consequently, the nomads of North Africa and Middle East, in order to trade with oases or to attack them, joined into tribal confederations or chiefdoms. Meanwhile, the nomads of the Eastern European steppe, on the outskirts of ancient states such as Byzantine and Rus’, set up quasi-imperial, state-like structures. In Inner Asia, the nomadic empire became a similar means of adaptation.^[8]
Thomas Hall shares Barfield’s opinion that there were synchronous cycles of rjse and decline in agricultural civilizations and nomadic empires. From this point of view, Hall, following Barfield, suggests that we should understand the Mongol Empire not as the peak of nomadic history governed by historical regularities, but as a unique case in which Chinggis Khan’s personality and power went beyond the limits of the traditional Hsiung-nu-Turkic model of imperial confederation.^[9] Thomas Barfield also draws attention to the role of contingency in world history. He notes that there were many accidental events in the life of the founder of the Mongol empire: if they had not taken place, the development of a number of human civilizations may have been notably different. Some scholars may interpret the lack of substantive causal interpretations as a weakness. But Barfield was right in saying that we are often inclined to exaggerate the role of objective tendencies and underestimate accidental factors.^[10] Thus the explanation of the stunning success of the Mongols in the twelfth century oscillates between the fairly new “scientific” models (e.g., Wallerstein’s core-periphery scheme) and the belief in the unique role of the historical personality, as old as the tradition of history-writing itself.

A PROFILE OF THE “NOMADIC EMPIRE”

How we should describe the polity established by the confederation of nomadic tribes led by Chinggis Khan is another serious problem. Scholars usually do not think about the appropriateness of the term “empire” as applied in reference to the medieval Mongols and the polity set up by Chinggis Khan, as this term was coined in Ancient Rome and was subsequently used in Western Europe rather exclusively, at least until the advent of modern colonialism. Nor is it clear how classifying the Mongol state as an empire influences our conceptualization of this state formation. We will argue that the Mongol Ulus should be classified as an empire, and will provide an explanation for how this definition helps comprehend specific organization of political space in the Mongol Ulus and how that empire grew out of the family and tribal ties of the Mongols.
In the historiography, “empire” is typically conceived as a form of statehood that has, as a rule, two main elements: 1) large territories and 2) the presence of dependent territories or colonies. Romila Thapar suggested, with reference to Eisenstadt’s works, that an empire can be viewed as a society consisting of a core (a highly developed expansionist state) and a periphery (the territories under the core’s influence). Social entities of completely different levels of complexity, ranging from local groups to the state itself, may constitute provinces. On the basis of the level of interaction among these subsystems, Thapar identified “early” and “late” empires. She suggests that in early empires, the core and the periphery did not constitute a strongly interrelated or united system and were different with respect to environment, economics, and levels of social and political development. The Roman Empire, the State of the Incas, and the Carolingian kingdom, for example, can be considered as classic examples of early empires. Late empires are characterized by a less differentiated infrastructure. Their provincial subsystems are limited in function and act as a form of raw material appendages with respect to the developed agrarian, industrial, and mercantile institutions of the core. The British, German, and Russian Empires at the beginning of the 20th century can be regarded as examples of this kind of empire.^[11]
Another type of early empire is the “barbarian” empire, which is mainly distinguished by the fact that its core was militarily complex, but less developed in socio-economic and political terms than the territories it exploited or conquered, and was in fact viewed by them as peripheral and provincial. All the empires founded by nomads were “barbarian,” but not all “barbarian” empires were founded by nomads. Therefore a nomadic empire can be determined as a variant of a barbarian empire. In this case a nomadic empire may be defined as a nomadic society organized according to the principle of military hierarchy and occupying a comparatively large territory, while exploiting neighboring territories, as a rule, by means of outward forms of exploitation (robbery, war, and contribution, extortion of gifts, non-equivalent trade, tribute, and so forth).
Let us turn away from general schemas (which are speculative and based on apriori deductions) and look into the everyday practices of complex nomadic societies. This involves a broad anthropological perspective alongside inquires into the economic and political aspects of social relations. The following characteristics of nomadic empires can be identified empirically:

1) a multistage hierarchy of social organization penetrated at all levels by tribal and super-tribal genealogical connections;
2) dual (on the wings) and triadic (on the wings and center) principles of administrative division within the empire;
3) a military hierarchy that characterizes the public organization of the core, mostly according to the decimal principle;
4) the yam system – the use of messengers as a specific way of linking administrative structures;
5) a specific system of power inheritance (empire as the property of the entire khan’s kin, an institution of co-government, khuriltai);
6) a specific character of relationships with the agricultural world.

It is also necessary to distinguish classic nomadic empires from, 1) the similar mixed agricultural and pastoral empires that had significant nomadic elements (the Arabic Caliphate, the Seljuk state, the Danube and Volga Bulgars, and the Ottoman empire), and 2) smaller quasi-imperial nomadic state-like formations (European Huns, Avars, Hungarians, Prazovic Bulgaria, Qara Khitai, and the Tatar Khanates after the collapse of the Golden Horde).
We can isolate three models of nomadic empires modus operandi:

1) the coexistence of nomads and crop growers, in which nomads obtain the surplus product by way of distant exploitation: raids, extortion of gifts – in essence, organized, non-equivalent trade (Hsiung-nu, Hsien-pi, Turks, Uighurs);
2) the dependence of agriculturalists on nomads, with exploitation in the form of tribute (Golden Horde, Yuan dynasty);
3) conquered agricultural societies into which nomads migrate. In this last type, robbery and tribute are replaced by a regular taxation of crop growers and townsmen (Northern Wei, the late Scythian kingdom, Danube and Volga Bulgaria, Seljuk Empire).^[12]

The stability of nomadic empires, including that of the Mongols, depended directly on the khan’s ability to organize external sources of important products. As a result, political connections between the tribes and government bodies of the steppe society were not purely autocratic. The super-tribal power persisted due to the fact that, on the one hand, membership in the imperial confederation ensured the tribes of political independence from neighbors and numerous other important advantages, and, on the other hand, the ruler of the nomadic empire and its environment secured for his tribe a certain inner autonomy within the empire.
The nomads could get necessary products of agriculture and trade in different ways:

1) by raiding and robbing (the Hsien-pi of the second and third centuries and the Mongols of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries with respect to China, the Pechenegs with respect to Rus’, the Crimean Khanate with respect to Russia);
2) subordinating agricultural societies and collecting of tribute (Scythia and the Skolots, the Khazar empire and the Slavs, the Golden Horde and Rus’), and also controlling the transcontinental silk trade;
3) conquering settled city-states, stationing garrisons on their territory, adopting the sedentary lifestyle, and taxing peasants in favor of new elites (T’o-pa, Khitan and Jurchen in China, Mongols in China and Iran);
4) setting up peaceful exchange and trade relations with neighboring settled town-societies, participation in intermediary trade and as mercenaries in political conflicts between agricultural civilizations (in many societies in certain periods of their history);
5) alternatively raiding and collecting tribute with respect to a settled society (Hsiung-nu, Turks, Uighurs).

THE GIFT OF POWER

The institutions of prestige goods and economics served as mechanisms that connected the headquarters of the steppe empire to its tribes. By manipulating gifts and giving them out to comrades-in-arms and tribal chiefs, the rulers of nomadic empires increased their political influence and prestige. At the same time, rulers bound those who received gifts by the commitment of giving in return. Those tribal chiefs who received gifts, could, on the one hand, satisfy their personal needs, and, on the other hand, increase their tribal status by giving out gifts to fellow tribesmen or by organizing ceremonial festivals. In addition to receiving a gift from the ruler, the tribal chief received a part of his supernatural charisma, which in turn contributed to the increase of his own prestige.
The distribution of gifts is well documented in written sources. In particular they are repeatedly mentioned in Jami’ al-Tawarikh by Rashid ad-Din and in the works of European travelers who visited the core of the Mongol Empire: “This Prince Temudjin takes off the clothes (he is wearing) and gives them out, gets off the horse that he rides and gives (it) out. He is the man who could take care of the province, of the troops and maintain ulus.”^[13] Not only was Chinggis Khan involved in numerous distributions of gifts but so were his nearest descendants, who ruled the Empire before its break-up into the independent Uluses of Ogedei, Guyuk, Mongke, and the Hulaguids.^[14]
The integration of tribes into the imperial confederation was carried out not only by way of the symbolic exchange of gifts between the chiefs of different ranks and the khan. The inclusion of various livestock groups into genealogical kinships, collective events, and ceremonies (seasonal gatherings of chiefs, holidays, religious ceremonies, great hunts, the building of monumental funeral structures) were also done for this purpose. In the later period, pominki (gifts to the rulers of steppe society) were one of the most important elements of Russian – Nogai relationships. Not only did the Nogai leaders once address the Russian tsar to justify their extortions by saying: “I would give out your Tsar’s gifts with my own hands to my brothers and nephews and children” as “they all ask me for money while I have no money and I have nothing to give them.”^[15]
The entire history of foreign political relationships between Muscovy and the Crimean Khanate, is, in essence, the history of permanent racketeering in relation to the Khanate’s neighbors, extortion from Russia and Lithuania of rich gifts and other privileges.^[16] Khoroshkevich considers that the northern neighbors were the main source of “material benefits to give out to princes, ulans, and ordinary military servants. Gifts were considered as the main form of expected incomes.”^[17] The Tatars constantly tried to manipulate an increase of the rate, explaining that the opposite side gave more. The Khans justified their irrepressible appetites by saying that if they did not keep asking for gifts and giving them out to their mirzas, the latter would bother them: “In this way the Crimean yurt (polity) has become the nest of predators who could not be suppressed by diplomatic means. Every time the khan was reproached for raids and attacks he readily replied that the attack was not sanctioned by him, that he could not stop his people, and that it was Moscow’s fault as it did not give enough gifts to princes, mirzas and ulans.”^[18]
At the same time it is wrong to look at the gifts extorted by the Mongols from a merely rational point of view. Yuri Krivosheev, who was the first to take up the subject of gift relationships between the Golden Horde khans and Russian princes,^[19] was correct in noting Plano Carpini’s misunderstanding of the nature of these relationships. Carpini accused the Mongols of being greedy and stingy: “Both the princes and other people, both noble and common, coax many gifts out of them, and if they do not get them, then they depreciate the envoys, moreover, they take no account of them, and if the envoys are sent by distinguished people then they do not wish to receive a modest gift and say instead: ‘You are coming from a distinguished person and are giving so little?’”^[20] This evaluation of the nomads can be explained by the preconceived attitude of the Pope’s envoy toward the Mongols. It is even more surprising due to the fact that the Mongol khans frequently demonstrated their generosity to their subjects and their contempt for wealth. It is enough to refer to the textbook example shown by Rashid ad-Din, when in 1258 Hulagu tried to make the captured Caliph eat the gold from the Bagdad treasuries. When the latter objected, saying that gold is inedible, the khan exclaimed angrily: “Why did you save it then instead of giving it to your warriors!”^[21]
Research by anthropologists, beginning with that of Marcel Mauss, showed that in pre-industrial societies, gift exchange was a universal means of establishing relationships between individuals. According to Mauss, gift exchange can be explained by anthropomorphism – the subjectivization of the outer world that is inherent in the archaic consciousness of primitive man. He saw a magical force in the gift, which, on the one hand, passed an element of the soul of the donor along with the gift (his luck, magical abilities, etc.) and, on the other hand, in case the gift was not compensated, could harm the owner of the initial gift.^[22]
Symbolic gift exchange (both on a horizontal level between equals and on a vertical level between the senior and his inferiors) allowed the transformation of material resources into relationships of psychological dependence and prestige, which in turn made it possible to obtain new resources, and, by giving them out, to increase prestige even more. Thus the rise of public status was carried out through the mechanisms of prestige economics: on the one hand, by arranging mass festivals where the riches were either given away demonstratively or destroyed, or, on the other hand, by developing exchange relations and building a network of dependent persons and debtors who could not make a return gift.
Discoveries made by substantivist anthropologists pushed historians toward new interpretations as well. Scholars have made especially important advancements in medieval European history. Medieval western European society was also based on the relationships of prestige economics, similar to the chiefdoms and archaic states of Africa and Pacifica. Generosity and justice were considered to be the most important virtues of a king. According to the vassals’ understanding, generosity was expressed by giving land, titles, and rich donations, and organizing sumptuous feasts and tournaments. The common people acknowledged the generosity in the arrangement of festivals and shows as well as through giving out plentiful alms. These qualities are extolled in the verses of court troubadours. In ballads about King Arthur and his knights, generosity is extolled as one of their major qualities. By giving away material values, the medieval ruler was maintaining his prestige and influence over his subjects. At the same time, in receiving a gift from the suzerain, a vassal considered that he had received a share of the sacred power of the master. The gift became an object of special reverence, an amulet. It contained a small amount of the magical power of the master. Even during hard times the vassal kept it, as it had the greatest value.

AKIN TO POLITICS

The Feudal Society by Marc Bloch has become a classic in the field. Numerous books and articles by different scholars, including Russian authors, have paid considerable attention to the issues of prestige economics in Western European feudal society.^[23] But historical anthropology also opens up considerable opportunities for the study of other regions and periods.
Nomadic empires were organized into what could be characterized as “imperial confederations.” Yet the very characteristic of these polities largely depends on the observer’s perspective: these confederations had an autocratic and state-like appearance from the outside (they were set up for obtaining external goods from outside the steppe), but still remained collectivist and tribal inside. The kin (obok) was of great significance and it was determined by the character of blood and kinship relations, expressed by the term uruk. The group of people designated by this term can be both part a kinship group (obok), or separate from it, forming a new kin, in which context uruk and obok act as synonyms. As part of a kinship group, uruk means lineage, and it is in this context that it is most often mentioned in the Secret History of the Mongols. It was necessary to be a blood relative in order to have the right to participate in kin sacrifice on the place of placental burials (ihesyin gazar). The making of rituals of the kin’s cult, open only to the kinship members, is one of the kin’s functions.^[24]
In Secret History one can trace the connection between the ideas of obok and irgen. This connection is expressed by the fact that kinship becomes the basis for a different social structure, which receives its name from the kin. This new ethnic commonality is marked in that source by the terms irgen, ulus, and ulus irgen, which act as synonyms. The use of two words from different languages (Turkic – ulus, and Tungus-Manchurian – irgen) with similar meaning is explained by the linguistic multi-competence of the Mongolian ethnos that was in formation (ethnogenesis) during the period under consideration. In the Mongolian source, the term irgen refers to Tatars in general as well as separate groups of Tatars; the Mongols and the Kiyats, who were part of the Mongols; forest peoples in general and the Tumats, who were part of them; and the Ungirats and Olkhonuts (the latter derived from the first).
All this is a witness to the fact that, in this case, we are dealing with a typological phenomenon that is characteristic of other peoples as well. For example, in Byzantine sources the term ethnos referred to the general mass of the Huns as well as its parts – the Avars and the Sabirs. Herodotus called all the Scythians and some peoples living in Scythia ethnoses. The social organism that was marked by the Mongolian terms irgen and ulus did not represent a state formation. Both terms were identical to the term ethnos, meaning “nation, people, or tribe.”
The study of the terms irgen and ulus – used both in an ethnic sense (Mongolian people = the Mongols) and a political sense (the chiefdom of the Mongols) – shows the coincidence of political and ethnic consciousness, and supports the inseparable nature of social consciousness and the pre-state-ethnic character in Mongolian society. The proof of the combined ethnic classification and political consciousness is not only in the poly-semantic character of the terms (nation, people, tribe), but in their partial coincidence with the meaning of the term, obok.
The hierarchy of taxis can be presented in the following way: uruk (lineage) – obok (kin or clan) – irgen ulus (tribe, chiefdom). By this, one ethnonym could be used with each of the taxis, which signified the level of social organization and, in this way, could be turned into a term designating a polity, as the aggregate of the kin was trasnforming from mere ethnic language and cultural commonality into a consolidated social and political organization – a tribe as an ethno-social commonality, the name of which was given by the ruling kin. Uruk, acting as a lineage on the level of a conic clan, could in its turn be equal to a kin, and the kin may become the basis for a different social unit that receives its name from the kin. In the sources this new ethnic commonality is named by the terms irgen, ulus, or ulus irgen.
The terms irgen and ulus referred to large ethno-social alliances, with the stress on people rather than formal institutions. These terms fixed the social-political commonality of heterogeneous space, whose name was derived from the name of the ruling class. The borders of unions marked as irgen ulus were defined not by the borders of the territories, though the latter were well defined, but rather by the circle of people heading its separate parts. Personal membership in this commonality was fixed in genealogy. The genealogy’s functions are a proof that it could be fictitious rather than factual. Inside of one conic clan, the relations of domination–subordination were marked by the place of the leaders of ethno-social unions in the genealogical table, with a special importance inside the clan attached to its elder and younger representatives, who stood out terminologically (elder – bekhi, younger – otchigin). The double principle of the ruling elite was conditioned by the simultaneous relevance of two systems of kinship in Mongolian medieval society: patrilinear, characterized by primogeniture (the eldest of the conic clan in the male line had the right to inherit power), and matrilinear, in which the youngest in the clan preserved the right to the kin’s territory – its sacral center (= locus of throne). In its turn, this led to competition for power, most distinctly revealed in the conflict between Khubilai and Arig-Buga.
We can say that the creation of this Mongolian commonality, which became the core of the Mongol Empire, occurred during the lifetime of Khabul-Khan. His activities contributed to the actualization of the political consciousness (meaning the ethnic Mongols), and he became the first bearer of the title khan. If in Secret History this commonality is called “all the Mongols” (mong. Qamuy mongyol), then according to the Chinese historiographer Li Sin-chuan, the designation of the territory of the Mongols dwelling in the South-West sounds a little different:

“Since the beginning of (years of ruling) Shao-sing (1131-1162) (they) started revolts. The commander-in-chief Tzung-bi fought (against them) during a number of years, (but) could not punish them in the end; only by dividing the troops he retained significant strategic points and, vice versa, bribed them with generous (gifts). Their owner was also illegally called “the first emperor-head of the kin” (tsu-yuan huang-di). During Chin’s Lyian (they) caused harm on the borders. (As we can see), they appeared a long time ago. <here omit>. Now the Tatars call themselves the Great Mongolian state, and therefore border officials call them (in short) meng-ta.”^[25]

In this abstract we can single out a few important facts. First is the appearance of “the first emperor-progenitor,” which according to the Secret History corresponds in time to the election of the first ruler of all the Mongols – Khabul Khan. Secondly, in the quoted text, the phrase “here omit” has been inserted. In an explanatory note, N. Munkuyev wrote: “Wang Guo-Wei omitted the phrase that mentions the attack of the Mongols on the Chin state: ‘When the Mongols (meng-zhen) invaded the state of Chin, (they) called themselves the great Mongolian state (da meng-gu guo). Therefore border officials called them Mongolia (Meng-gu)’ (Li Sin-chuan. Tza-tzi, collection 2, chapter 19, p. 591).”^[26] Designating the territory of Three Rivers – the Onon, Kerulen, and Tola populated by the Mongols as da menggu-guo – and emphasizing the title of its head, undoubtedly, marked the appearance of a new type of commonality – that of a polity – and strengthened its role on the political arena of the region. As we can see, the emerging would-be empire was driven by and structured along the clan hierarchies. At the same time, the structural elements of domination and the core-periphery system of resource exchange, which have been identified by contemporary scholars as signs of “empireness,” were built into the Mongol commonality from the very beginning by the demographic principles of authority distribution. In a sense, “imperialism” as a system of power relations preceded the empire and, furthermore, could have existed without any active expansionist ambitions.