Why were people from the Asian Steppes able to militarily dominate Europeans on a repeated basis?

Excellent question! I respectfully invite you to visit my new website "The Nomadic Horse Peoples of Central Asia" at http://www.horsenomads.info Please note it is dot-info, not dot-com. I think the textual "Introduction" section of my website addresses your question rather well. Thanks! Stephen W. Richey

Communications/Logistics. Eastern Europe was pretty undeveloped with poor local infrastructure to support armies or any great wealth to attract conquerers. Pushing out from Europe across the steppes just isn't attractive and is difficult. The mongols or other horse nomads are able to cross the area more easily, moving quicker and able too graze their horses.

I dont agree that asian steppe armies "dominated". Difficult armies to fight but steppe armies never made that big a inroads, the Mongols nibbled the edges, defeating two of the smaller kingdoms in a couple of battles, the Huns get a way in but only controlled a small area of civilised Europe at the time for a short period.

Horse nomad armies are hard to 'force' to fight not having a logistical base to defend, generally can pick and chose win to fight being much more strategically mobile generally. (though they need large grasslands to support their horses, and it takes lot of hours out of the day to graze horses, so they might be very quick in the short term, but slower over a longer term) So generally they withdraw rather that be defeated.

Horse Nomad armies are a different military paradigm from civilised armies and generally the civilised armies are poorly adapted for fighting them. They can 'appear' quickly, moving quickly causing a lot of confusion, as armies used to vastly different opponents fail to adjust. A couple of battles in the crusades the turkish horse archer armies were smashed by european Knights failing to adjust themselves, it's not certainly that the nomad horse archer army just wins. The Mongols had superior élan, discipline and organisation compared to your average horse nomad army.

The Saxons at one point in the 8-9th centuries settled in eastern Poland, Western Belarus. After an invasion of Bulgars and Slavs in the 10th century a sundering occurred in which a group of Saxons migrated to the lower Volga region. This tribe of Germanic east Saxons formed a small empire and expanded further east into the Kirghiz regions and possible as far as Manchuria. This is as far as I know the only European tribe that reached Far East Asia. Albeit much assimilation and inter-mixing occurred along the way. They also apparently adopted Islam at some point.

Your original question does indeed provoke much intrigue. There are a billion reasons. When the Huns invaded, Rome was already in a decline from internal issues and Germanic invasions. If the Huns invaded 3 centuries earlier the Romans would have handled them. During the Mongol invasions Poland and Russia were fragmented, although I'm not sure why the Hungarians and Bulgarians were defeated so easily as they had established kingdoms and used the nearly the same tactics as the Mongols. conceptual information on the East Saxins John Chambers, The Devil's Hors*m*n: The Mongol Invasion of Europe, Atheneum, 1979. p. 31, mentions these saxons.

Focusing on the very sentence of your question, one "simple" answer to give regarding the superiority of the steppe riders was the use of the humble stirrup.

Their recorded use of the stirrup to stabilise the rider in the saddle, allowing them to twist and lean, gave them a huge mobility advantage.

In "the West" the stirrup was just a mounting aid (the word even etymologically means that, just as, for example, the German term Steigbuegel).

So, you ended up with major armies that were able to fire and whirl with unprecedented speed, while their opponents could mostly only barrel forward in a fairly straight line. Any sudden turn and you had to hold on somehow. Without stirrups, using only your thighs to brace is haphazard at best and will tire you out in no time at the worst. Meaning you had to hold on with your hands, while your opponents used those hands to fire volleys of arrows non-stop and ride circles around you. Also, the only thing you had to hold would likely be your reins, a sure way to cut the speed of your horse. Which was precisely not what you likely had in mind.

Contrary to some notions on the stirrup bringing about the knight with shield and lance who would brace themselves in the stirrup in their charge, the main advantage was indeed for the mounted archery used by the steppe people to devastating effect. As Mounted Archers of the Steppe 600BC-AD1300 by Antony Karasular explains, "The stirrup, though often touted as a big step in seat security for sword-, spear- and lance-wielding hors*m*n, really had more to do with creating a a stable base for mounted archery. It is thus not surprising that it is first seen among mounted archers." (page 47).

As this source also states, solid evidence of (bilateral) stirrups comes from the 1st century AD. The also coincides with the prerequisite invention of the saddle tree, creating a solid, stable frame on the horse's back which locks it in place while distributing weight. For lance warfare, the stirrup is possibly of less importance (ibid.), but as stated above, the steppe peoples were renowned (notorious?) for their use of hit&run archery attacks, not the armoured attacks of medieval knights.

I am still trying to get my hands on the full proceedings of "Stirrups and archaeological populations: Bio-anthropological considerations for determining their use based on the skeletons of two Steppe riders" Summary here, which should give some fascinating additional information on how the physique of these people changed.

The ability of steppe riders and mounted archers to fire with their bodies twisted around while riding away from the enemy has even made it into the English language: the "parting shot" as a snide remark made in passing or left while walking away from an argument has its roots in the Parthian Shot, which describes this technique and according to Livy in "The Life of Crassus" was the main contributor to one of Rome's worst defeats in 53BC at Carrhae (not the renowned Parthian cataphracts, i.e. armoured "knights").

Page 53 of "Mounted Archers" provides a great summary of how all the previous items combined to offer an answer to the original question and, while fascinating, is too long to quote here in full.

Summarised:

• the steppe armies followed a principle of "march separately, attack united"

• this had multiple advantages: make it easier to provide fodder for their horses, but also hide their full strength from the enemy

• apparently uncoordinated attacks would confuse the enemy, but the speed and mobility of their mounts allowed them to combine their forces with rapid speed as soon as a weakness in the enemy's force had been spotted

• the Mongols, who did have heavy armoured riders for such a purpose, perfected the technique and even armies (e.g. in Georgia and Russia) who were aware of it and tried to counteract and avoid it, failed and were wiped out.

Speaking as a rider, I can tell you first hand that riding without stirrups, while a good balance exercise, is not something you want to do when the going gets a bit rough and the speed gets high. A flood of YouTube videos showing people jumping without saddles, stirrups, bridles notwithstanding.

You will find discussions of this aplenty in equestrian literature. Interestingly enough, one of the most recent mentions of it was on one of the earlier episode of the History of English podcast, in the episode of Gothic and other Germanic migrations under pressure of the Huns.

I think the answer is demography. In European urban and agricultural societies the main limiting factor was the extent of available land. While Europeans had high fertility rate at the time, most children could not reach their puberty due to food shortages.

At the same time, the nomad peoples could just divide and find new pastures. And the territory of the Asian steppes is enormous.

In most cases where Mongols were faced with numerically equal enemy, they retreated. There are very little cases where Mongols successfully defeated their enemies with equal number of troops. And in most battles even when they were victorious, they suffered greater losses.

As to the question why Europeans did not expand to the steppes in the East, this is simple: there was nothing to grab in the steppes. No treasures, no cities, no profit. And the land was poor for settled agriculture. On the other side, Europeans took considerable and repeated efforts to expand to the Middle East because that region had things to take.

Why weren't Celts, Ostrogoths, Teutonic knights, or Slavs pushing east?

At times, all of these people pushed eastwards. It just depended on relative technology and strength of population.

Celts: At maximum expansion, about 270 BC, they invaded Poland, the Balkans, and even central Anatolia and the Ukraine.

Goths: Before moving west ahead of the Huns, the Germanic Goths moved from Sweden and the Baltic to the steppes around the Black Sea by around 100 AD.

Slavs: During the expansion of the Slavs about 600 AD they expanded deep into Russia, eastward.

Teutonic Knights: An odd choice in that the group is best known for its Eastward Conquests of the Baltic.

For Mongols specifically, it was in part their unparallelled-till-20th-century tactical flexibility.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mongol_military_tactics_and_organization

Note that the first such peoples from the Eurasian Steppes were the Germans (Goths in particular), so it wasn't the people themselves so much as something about the environment.

The period in which this was occurring, roughly 400AD to 1350 (or Andrianople to the popularization of Gunpowder), is what historian Charles Oman referred to as The Age of Cavalry. During this period, there was essentially no good answer to massed Cavalry from the other military arms.

The problem Europe (and China, and other settled farming societies) had here was that a good cavalry arm of the day required an immense amount of training. Pastoral societies (which the Eurasian steppe was uniquely suited to) essentially get this for free, as every adult male practically spends their life on horseback just to perform the herding functions they need to survive. At need, every adult male in this society can be drafted into the military as expert hors*m*n. However, a peasant farming society cannot do this, so militarily they just can't compete.

Different societies dealt with this problem in different ways. China was rich enough to buy off the pastoralists a lot of the time, and coherent enough to absorb their conquerors when they couldn't buy them off. The Byzantines (nee Eastern Roman Empire), were sitting on a rich trading route, and used a combination of buying off the pastoralists, and very strong fortifications. The poor western empire disintegrated, but eventually hit upon a kind of caste society where the lower classes, along with all remaining governmental machinery, worked entirely to support an upper class of hors*m*n.

You might also ask why these people from the steppes also created so much havoc in CHINA. Because they are really two sides of the same coin. In "economic" terms, there are two reasons: 1) "comparative advantage" and 2) "incentives."

To use a model derived from Civilization II (I like to play the Russians and the Mongols on the "real world" map), there are three major items: food, trade, and resources.

By definition, the steppe people are deficient in food and trade, but are comparable to more "settled" and civilized people in resources, and ultimately, weaponry. (At least until the modern age when technology becomes a major factor in weaponry.) "Comparative advantage" suggests that steppe people will specialize in weaponry and war-making, while others with more natural resources will spend more efforts developing agriculture, trade, and, education. Also, the steppe people are more likely to use horses, because the steppe is so poor in food that they have to wander to get enough of it, giving them a further advantage in war.

The other issue is incentive. The impoversished steppe people have every incentive to raid wealthier people for food, resources, and technology. Even if they are better armed, farmers and more settled people aren't likely to uproot their lives for the dubious privilege of chasing steppe people on the plains. Even the Teutonic knights conquered Prussia over one generation, and had they succeeded with the other Baltic states, it would have been one generation at a time. It took Prussia two generations to get three "slices" of Poland. For the Mongols, each "piece" might have represented one YEAR, not one generation, of campaigning.

The danger in the Civilization II game for the Russians and the Mongols is that they will eventually fall behind in technology. That's what happened to the Mongols in "real life." If they can use their military power to stay even in technology and trade (by conquering or coercing more civilized people), while maintaining a military advantage, they can become very powerful, like the Russians.

Here is an outline of a few sentences distilled from many long paragraphs at my previously mentioned website.

The apparent military superiority of the horse-mounted nomads of central Eurasia during ancient and medieval times was due to:

1. The Scythian, Sarmatian, Alan, Hun, Avar, Magyar, Mongol, et al armies had a tremendous advantage in both strategic and tactical mobility. They were 100% horse-mounted. And every warrior in these cultures owned a string of several horses so he (or she!) always had a fresh horse to ride, which you could not say about the cavalry units of sedentary cultures (Romans, Chinese, Russians, etc.)

2. This tremendous advantage in strategic and tactical mobility enabled the nomad armies to make maximum use of surprise.

3. In a culture made up almost entirely of horse-riding livestock herders and big game hunters, almost every adult in that culture, both males and a certain percentage of females (about 20%), could be instantly transformed into a battle-ready horse-archer warrior. In settled cultures, with their farms, numerous urban trades, and merchants and bureaucrats, only a small percentage of the males could be trained and equipped as soldiers.

4. NOTE: The favorite mode of fighting for the nomads was horse-mounted archery and a healthy, athletic, well-trained woman can shoot a bow and arrow from astride a horse as well as a man. No women that we know of stood and fought in the pure-upper-body-strength-intensive infantry phalanxes or legions of the settled cultures. Archaeological findings confirm that in some tribes, about 20% of the horse warriors were women, thus giving rise to ancient legends about “Amazons.”

5. Tactically, in the pre-gunpowder era, the most effective and lethal fighting method while on flat, open steppe terrain was horse-mounted archery followed up by a final charge by select heavily armed shock cavalry. And the steppe nomads invented horse archery and were the best in the world at it. And—the steppe nomads therefore routinely massacred Roman, Chinese, Russian, and Germanic armies that either came out onto the steppe or were operating along the margins of the steppe.

6. Unlike many current historians, I do not disparage the notion of “environmental determinism.” I maintain that the inherently brutal natural conditions of the steppe environment produced inherently and uniquely tough, self-reliant, omni-competent people.

7. The farther the nomads got off the steppe, the more they found the power of their favorite tactics diluted by irrigation ditches, hedges, woodlots, steep hills, sodden rice paddies, and walled cities. Further, the cool damp weather of Western Europe caused the tremendously powerful type of compound-recurve bow used by the nomads to deteriorate.

8. As the centuries rolled on, the horse nomads could terrorize and often dominate sedentary peoples who outnumbered the horse nomads by something like ten to one. But the horse nomads were simply too few and too poor materially to be able to make permanent conquests of settled nations (though a few nomad tribes became short-lived dynasties ruling over parts of China.) Eventually, the settled peoples, with their science, technology, and industry, learned to make guns of all types and sizes. And making guns was something that constantly moving livestock herders living in tents could never do. Such was the beginning of the end for the freedom of the horse nomads starting in the 16th Century.