War and peace and war, p.3
War and Peace and War, page 3
“On September 9 of the year 1582, of the feast day of the Holy Father Ioachim and of Anna, the intrepid warriors reached the land of Siberia and attacked many Tatar and native settlements down the Tura River. They valiantly made their way to the Tavda River and captured Tatar prisoners at its mouth. One of them, named Tauzak, was a member of the court of the tsar [here meaning Kuchum Khan, not the Russian tsar]; he told them all about the Siberian tsars and princes and horsemen and about Tsar Kuchum. When they learned everything from Tauzak, they set him free to inform Sultan Kuchum about their arrival and their strength and bravery....
“The evil Tsar Kuchum sent his son [actually, nephew] Mahmet-Kul with a great multitude of warriors and ordered them to stand bravely against the invading Russians. Kuchum ordered them to fell trees and build an abatis on the Irtysh River at Chuvash, and to reinforce it with earth, and fortify it with defense weapons. This was to be a substantial fortification.
“Mahmet-Kul and his multitudinous warriors reached the place called Babasan. The Russian warriors, atamans, and Cossacks were considerably alarmed to see such a great assemblage of the heathens, but they put their trust in God and set forth from their forts and fell upon the heathens. The heathens attacked the invading forces mercilessly from horseback and wounded the Cossacks with their lances and sharp arrows. The Russian warriors fired back [with their arquebuses and light cannon] and killed a vast multitude of the heathen. There was a fierce struggle with the Tatar warriors, and both sides suffered a great number of casualties. The heathens, seeing so many of their warriors fall before the Russians, took flight....
“When the Cossacks reached the domain of Karacha, a second battle took place against this councillor of Tsar [Kuchum]. They captured his domain and plundered his honey and other property and loaded it into their boats. The heathens, on horseback and foot, pursued them to the Irtysh River. The atamans and Cossacks advanced bravely against the heathens massed on the riverbank, and both sides lost many men killed in this great battle. Then the heathens, seeing so many of their men killed by the Russian warriors, took final flight. In that battle, Ermak’s army lost only a few men, but almost everyone was wounded.
“When Tsar Kuchum saw his warriors overwhelmed, he retired with some survivors and camped on the top of a hill called Chuvash. His son Mahmet-Kul remained at the abatis with a large rearguard, while the Cossacks proceeded up the Irtysh River.
“When the Russian forces came upon a small settlement which belonged to Atik-murza, they took it and set up their camp there, because night had already fallen and it was dark. The Cossacks saw an immense gathering of the heathen at their abatis and were in great consternation. They said to one another, ‘How can we stand against such a multitude?’ They pondered this, then formed a circle and took counsel together [this was the traditional way of reaching a decision in the Cossack democracy]. They debated. ‘Should we retreat, or stand together as one?’ Some brooded and were of the opinion, ‘It would be best for us to retreat.’ But others were firm and resolute and proclaimed, ‘Oh, brother comrades in arms, how can we retreat? Autumn has already set in. Ice is freezing in the rivers. We cannot take to flight and bring reproach and disgrace on ourselves. Rather let us place our trust in God, for victory does not come from having a great mass of warriors, but from the help of God on high. It is possible that God will help even the helpless. Brothers, have we ourselves not heard what evil this godless and cursed heathen of the Siberian land, Sultan Kuchum, has brought on our Russian land of Perm, how he has laid waste the towns of our Sovereign [the Russian tsar], and murdered and enslaved Orthodox Christians? Do we not know of the number of the Stroganovs’ forts he has destroyed? Almighty God will punish the cursed one for shedding Christian blood. Brothers, let us recall our oath, which we swore before God in the presence of honest men [the Stroganovs]. We gave our word and promised, kissing the cross, that if Almighty God helped us, we would not retreat, even though we might die to the last man. We cannot turn back. We cannot dishonor ourselves and break the oath we have sworn. If the Almighty Glorious God of the Trinity will help us, then even if we fall, our memory will not die in these lands, and our glory will be eternal!’
“Hearing this, the atamans and Cossacks were emboldened in spirit, and their courage was renewed. They all shouted an oath in one voice. ‘We are ready to die for the holy church of God. We will suffer for the true Orthodox faith. We will serve the devout Sovereign Tsar and Grand Prince Ivan Vasilevich of all Russia [Ivan IV]. We will stand firm against the heathens to the last drop of our blood, unto death itself. Brothers, we will not violate oaths, we will stand as one, steadfast!’ ...
“They set out from their camp to go to battle on October 23, the feast day of the Holy Apostle James, brother of our Lord. All together, in one voice, they gave tongue, shouting, ‘God be with us! Lord, help us, your humble servants!’
“They advanced on the abatis bravely and fearlessly, and there was a fierce battle with the heathens. The heathens fired countless arrows from the top of the abatis and from embrasures. They wounded many of Ermak’s brave men and killed others. And when they saw these brave men fall, the heathens rushed out in sorties through the abatis in three places, hoping to force the Cossacks into flight. During these they fought ferociously, in hand-to-hand combat.
“The Cossacks advanced against the heathens as one man and proved their bravery and ferocity before the dishonored and godless heathen. At length, the heathens’ strength weakened, and God gave the Cossacks victory over them. The Cossacks gained ground, overpowered the heathens, and killed a multitude. They forced them back from the abatis and placed their own battle standard on it. They wounded Mahmet-Kul, and his warriors carried him off in a small boat across the Irtysh River.
“Tsar Kuchum, who was encamped on the hill, saw the defeat of his Tatars and the wounding and flight of his son Mahmet-Kul. He ordered his mullahs to call out their wretched Muslim prayers. He called on his foul gods to aid him, but received not the slightest assistance. At the same time the Ostiak princes [the native allies of the Tatars] fell back with their men, however they could....
“The wretched tsar galloped off to his town of Sibir, taking a small part of his wealth, and then continued his flight, leaving the town of Sibir deserted. Brave Ermak and his men came to Sibir, later called Tobolsk, on October 26, the feast day of the Holy Martyr Demetrios of Salonika. They gave thanks to God for having given them victory over the godless and cursed heathens, and rejoiced mightily. They seized a great amount of gold and silver, cloth of gold, precious stones, sables, martens and valuable foxes, and divided these among themselves.
“This is splendid to relate, and truly it glorifies the Almighty God of the Trinity who had given the small but strong Russian warriors victory over the heathens, and defeat of the boastful Tsar Kuchum. Tsar Kuchum had assembled an army that outnumbered the Cossacks by 10 to 20 or even 30 to 1. The cursed one lamented the great number of his warriors who had fallen. Thus God brings down the haughty and favors the humble Christians.”
THIS STORY OF ERMAK’S CONQUEST of Siberia, as told by the contemporary chronicler, is interesting not only because of the events that it relates, but also in how it is told. The ideological spin that the chronicler puts on the story provides a glimpse into how the Russians viewed their conflict with the Tatars, and what were the motivations of the people who advanced the Russian frontier. But let us first focus on the basic outline of the events. A band of a few hundred intrepid European adventurers defeats hordes of natives, conquers a kingdom, and captures an enormous booty. The parallel between Ermak’s Cossacks and Cortés’ or Pizarro’s conquistadors in the New World is striking (although, to be sure, the amount of loot captured by Pizarro dwarves anything that Ermak could possibly have found in Sibir).
How did they do it? Jared Diamond recently explained the spectacular feats of Cortés and Pizarro by arguing that the Spaniards had guns, germs, and steel, whereas Native Americans, who had no communications with the continent of Eurasia before 1492, did not. This explanation makes sense for the Spanish conquest of America, but it does not help us to understand the Russian conquest of Siberia. We can immediately dismiss two thirds of Diamond’s triad, because both sides had been exposed to the same germs and steel for centuries. As for guns, the Russians employed them with great effect against the bow-and-arrow-wielding nomads. But why were the Russians able to equip themselves with guns, and the Tatars not? Neither of these peoples was the inventor of firearms. (If anything, the Tatars were in a much better position than the Russians to get gunpowder directly from its inventors, the Chinese.) A racist explanation, stressing the difference between the Europeans and non-Europeans, is unsatisfactory because other Turkic people—the Ottomans and the Mughals—eagerly adopted firearms and used them with great effect to build huge empires. The Crimean Tatars a thousand miles to the southwest of their Siberian cousins started using siege and handheld guns around 1530. In any case, the role of firearms in the decisive battle of Sibir was quite minimal. The primitive matchlock arquebuses of the Cossacks were slow to fire, lacked accuracy, and could not be used in damp weather. The main impact of the gunpowder revolution in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, after all, was the ability of artillery to knock down medieval fortifications. Handheld guns started becoming truly effective only after the seventeenth century, with the invention of the flintlock musket.
The mystery deepens when we consider what happened in eastern Europe three centuries before Ermak. In 1236, a great army of steppe invaders led by Batu, one of Chinggis Khan’s grandsons, gathered in the steppes west of the Irtysh, in the same area that three centuries later was to become the khanate of Sibir. Although we call them the Mongols, the ethnic Mongols comprised perhaps a tenth of the host’s number; the rest were a tribal mixture dominated by various Turkic peoples: Keraits, Tatars (whose name was expanded by the Russians to cover all kinds of Turko-Mongolic steppe people), Uigurs, Khwarizmians, Turkomans, and so on. The Mongol subjugation of eastern Europe began with the destruction of the realm of the Volga Bulgars. Starting in 1237, and for the next three years, the Mongols systematically conquered practically all of Russia. (Only Novgorod in the northwest escaped direct attack, but nevertheless had to submit to Batu and agree to pay tribute.) One of the most remarkable aspects of this conquest was that although each principality fought bravely against the invaders, the Russians were unable to unite against the Mongol threat. This inability to work together is most graphically illustrated by the tale of two brothers, Yurii and Roman, who ruled the Ryazan principality southeast of Moscow. When the Mongol army approached, Yurii shut himself up in the principality’s capital, Ryazan, while Roman, instead of coming to the aid of his brother, stayed in a smaller town, Kolomna, some 50 miles to the northwest of Ryazan. The Mongols first took Ryzan, killed Yurii, and slaughtered the entire population. Then they went to Kolomna, defeated and killed Roman before the fortress, and captured Kolomna itself.
The same story repeated itself over and over again. Fragmentation of Russia into dozens of tiny principalities and the inability of the Russians to unite against the external threat were one of the main reasons (perhaps the main one) why the Mongols were able to conquer Russia in the thirteenth century. This shortcoming was obvious to the Russians themselves, as made very clear in the Ode on the Downfall of the Russian Land, written shortly after the Mongol conquest.
The Mongols, by contrast, excelled at teamwork. Historians generally agree that the ability of the Mongols to crush all their opponents was not due to any technical advantage in weaponry, nor to their numbers. (They often fought against and destroyed numerically superior enemies.) The explanation for the Mongol success must be sought elsewhere.
The Mongol army was a well-oiled social mechanism, capable of discipline and internal cohesion to the degree unknown in Europe since the Roman times. The Mongol armies deployed, advanced, and maneuvered in eerie silence. There were not even shouts of command because movements of the blocks of cavalry were governed by the flag signals from the standard bearers. At the right moment, the whole army suddenly charged, yelling and shrieking like demons. Such tactics were extremely unnerving to their adversaries.
One of the favorite tricks used by the Mongols was the fake retreat, luring the unwary enemy into ambush and annihilation. Performing such maneuvers with a host of 100,000 called for precision timing and frictionless cooperation. Another tactic, described by the papal envoy Piano Carpini, was as follows. “They meet the first cavalry onset with a front consisting of prisoners and foreign auxiliaries, while the bulk of their forces take up their positions on the wings in order to encompass the enemy. They do this so effectively that he fancies them far more numerous than they are. If the adversary defends himself stoutly, they open their ranks and allow him to escape, whereupon they dash in pursuit and slay as many of the fugitives as they can.” The world historian William McNeill noted that “the Mongols were capable of moving in widely dispersed columns over all sorts of terrain, while maintaining communication between the separate columns so as to assure concentration of all forces at the decisive time and place. Subotai, the general in charge of the invasion of Europe in 1241, thought nothing of coordinating columns operating in Poland with others pressing into Hungary, despite the Carpathian barrier between them. No comparable feats of coordination over such distances were achieved by European armies until the late nineteenth century.”
The Mongol unity of purpose extended from the movements of large-scale military units all the way down to interpersonal relations. As the ambassador from the French court William of Rubruck reported, “In the whole world, there are no more obedient subjects than the Tatars, neither among lay people nor among the monks; they pay their lords more respect than any other people and would hardly dare lie to them. Rarely if ever do they revile each other, but if they should, the dispute never leads to blows. Wars, quarrels, the infliction of bodily harm, and manslaughter do not occur among them, and there are no large-scale thieves or robbers among them.” It was this remarkable social cohesion that explains the spectacular successes of the Mongols against all other Eurasian armies from Korea to Hungary.
THE CHARACTERIZATION OF THE MONGOLS that stresses their ability to cooperate will probably sound strange to many readers. Cooperation is a “nice” word, and the Mongols of Chinggis Khan were most definitely not nice people. They slaughtered literally millions of men, women, and children, and enslaved millions of survivors. They turned dozens of wealthy and beautiful cities into ruins and piled pyramids of hundreds of thousands of skulls as grisly monuments to their achievements. They practiced cruel executions and unspeakable tortures on those unlucky to fall into their hands. And wasn’t the empire of Chinggis Khan a typical “oriental despotism”? So how is it possible to speak about the spirit of cooperation in such a society?
This is a very important question because, as discussed in subsequent chapters, cooperation, or more generally the capacity for collective action, is a key factor in the rise of empires. It must be noted immediately that the concept of oriental despotism, if it means the absolute power of one individual over the whole society, is a sociological nonsense. A single person, no matter how physically impressive, cannot rule against the wishes of all of his subjects. As soon as he falls asleep, one of the people he has oppressed will end his tyranny by sticking a knife in him. In real life, tyrants could rule only because they had the support of a certain group of people—the palace guard, the aristocracy, perhaps the top bureaucrats. Only groups can oppress other groups and whole societies, and to do that the “oppressor” group must be internally cohesive. In other words, oppression can only be accomplished from the basis of cooperation, paradoxical as it sounds.
The social matrix of Western societies (weaved from such things as education, mass media, and even cocktail-party chitchat) conditions us to think that the only legitimate source of social power is “we the people.” As a corollary, we tend to assume that nondemocratic societies are held together by force alone. A recent illustration of this pervasive cultural bias is the implicit assumption by the American planners of the Iraq invasion in 2003 that as soon as Saddam Hussein was overthrown by American troops, the Iraqi people would work together with the occupation authorities in building a democratic society.
There is no question that the Ba‘athist regime of Saddam Hussein used violence and intimidation to keep down dissident groups, and the many atrocities committed by Saddam’s henchmen are well documented. However, this was not the whole story. In addition to force, the regime relied on cooperation from certain other groups: the core support came from Saddam’s clan, with the wider power base provided by the Sunni Arabs of Iraq. In addition, a more diffuse group, originating from other ethnic segments of the Iraqi population (the Shiite Arabs and the Sunni Kurds and Turkmen), had come to think of themselves as “Iraqis” first and members of their ethnic group second. Although this group, let us loosely call them nationalists, did not actively support the Ba’athist regime, they acquiesced to its rule. Although perhaps not holding the legitimacy of Saddam’s government terribly high, many of them consider the legitimacy of the occupying powers to be even lower.
