EMPIRES OF THE STEPPES

Academic survey of the horse-based cultures of the Eurasian plains, which often rode out to conquer neighboring lands.

Harl, a professor of classical and Byzantine history, took the occasion of a sabbatical canceled by the pandemic to write “a sweeping narrative covering forty-five centuries.” This book is just that, and though the text is occasionally labored, the author covers an impressive amount of ground. His early pages deal with the proto–Indo-European peoples who ranged out of the steppes to settle in places as far-flung as Ireland and western China, the latter known to us through remnants of an ancient language called Tocharian as well as DNA analysis that shows a blend of European and Siberian origins. A succession of nomadic peoples—Scythian, Parthian, Mongol, Turkic, Khazar—followed over the centuries, many of them using their military advantages (including the innovations of war carriages and massed cavalry) to seize territory as distant from their epicenter as the outskirts of Paris and the whole of India. Still, as Harl writes, their successes were often short-lived. When Attila died in what is now Budapest after having “overindulged in a wedding celebration to his newest wife,” the vast empire that he built fell apart. Only Genghis Khan’s lasted much beyond his life, while his descendant Kublai Khan succeeded in unifying China after overthrowing the Song dynasty—though he frittered away his energies by trying to absorb the jungles of Southeast Asia, which were not conducive to Mongol cavalry tactics. For all the evanescence of the conquests by people like the Uzbek hero (and mass murderer) Tamerlane, Harl observes that the nomads had a lasting effect on the world. The Mongols, for one, brought gunpowder and the arts of papermaking and printing to Europe, and Tamerlane inadvertently shifted the seat of power to the north and west of his homeland from Kiev to Moscow.

An ambitious, impressively researched study that will interest advanced students of world history.