No animal has had as profound an impact on human history as the horse. The journey begins in prehistory, with a small, shy animal that humans hunted for food. Hunters domesticated the horse in order to ensure a supply of meat and, later, mare’s milk, which is more nutritious than cow’s milk. This was a watershed event for both species, transforming the horse from an animal fleeing at a gallop from the mere smell of humans into the most valuable of their livestock. The horse’s need to roam far and wide for pasture prompted the horse herders to spread out across the Eurasian steppe. Then herders learned to ride horses in order to keep up with their far-flung herds; this changed the course of history.
Excerpted from the Introduction to Raiders, Rulers, and Traders: The Horse and the Rise of Empires by David Chaffetz. Copyright © 2024 by David Chaffetz. Used with permission of the publisher, W. W. Norton & Company, Inc. All rights reserved.
Riding made the horse a strategic asset, as consequential in its day as petroleum was to the twentieth century, while breeding turned the horse into the swift, powerful animal we know today. Horses and riders swarmed the steppe, forming the first steppe empires—the Huns, the Kushans, and the Celestial Turks, to name just a few. Though largely forgotten today, these empires once loomed large, dominating huge expanses of our planet.
Although the steppe-based empires contained a fraction of the human population of the agricultural centers of civilization, including China, India, and Iran, they controlled half of the world’s horses. This gave horse-breeding peoples an outsized role in history. They brought the old, agricultural civilizations into contact with one another for the first time. Arts, religious beliefs, sports, and fashion spread from one end of the old world to the other in the saddlebags of the steppe horsemen. The horse itself became both a vehicle and a symbol: gods manifested themselves upon them, kings were buried with them, princesses rode them in polo matches, and poets praised them in verses that local schoolchildren still recite.
The horse is the key to understanding the history of the vast territory stretching from the Danube to the Yellow River. Huge herds of horses flourished on the cool, dry, and grassy steppe of today’s Mongolia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, Ukraine, and Hungary. The very names of these countries recall nations born out of steppe horse power. The menace presented by steppe raiders forced settled, agriculture-based civilizations to breed their own horses, trade and fight for them, and adopt their own version of horse culture. Horses became almost as central to their economies, diplomacy, and military strategies as they were to the steppe peoples’. The steppe, with its vast pasturelands, always had an upper hand in breeding numerous horses. The settled peoples, less adept at breeding, and with less grazing land, had to expend huge efforts to maintain their own herds. They hired steppe horse breeders as grooms and mercenaries, sometimes establishing whole steppe nations on their frontiers. As steppe people thus grew more and more enmeshed with the settled peoples, the ground was laid for a steppe-based empire to take over the whole world.
This is what Genghis Khan and the Mongols achieved. Adroitly uniting far-flung steppe horsemen, Genghis Khan exploited the power of the horse more systematically than anyone had managed before. The Mongol Empire, which flourished from 1206 to 1368, represents the apogee of horse-breeding rule, with its decisive triumph over sedentary peoples. Traditional histories explain that after the Mongol era, the increasing use of gunpowder on the battlefield made horses obsolete as a strategic asset.
Yet horses continued to power the last three great land empires of Eurasia.
In the sixteenth century, a Mongol war band we know as the Mughals,mustering the biggest cavalry force India had ever seen, unified Asia’s sub-continent for the first time in a millennium. By the end of the eighteenth century, Manchu China, allied with the Mongols’ still-formidable horse power, had extended China’s steppe frontier farther than any previous
dynasty—defining the borders of today’s People’s Republic of China. By the end of the nineteenth century, Russia, which originated as a Mongol vassal state, had used the horse power of the Ukrainian Cossacks to conquer the largest part of Eurasia. Though Russia and China would put an end to the outsized role of the steppe horse breeders in this period, horses remained a decisive source of political power at the dawn of the twentieth century.
It may seem a strange concept today, but the essential role of the horse was well understood over those millennia. The Chinese Han dynasty general Ma Yuan argued in the first century CE that “horses are the foundation of military power, the great resources of the state.” Further, he warned the emperor, “If the power of the horse is allowed to falter, the state will totter to a fall.” “The principal thing that kings, heroes, great warriors, and men of renown are in want of,” wrote the seventeenth-century Mughal general Firuz Jang, “and on which the glory and majesty of the empire, and the conquest of kingdoms and regions depends, is the horse. Without him, no sovereignty could be erected, no countries subdued, nor no mighty monarch reign.”
But horses were much more than the weapons of empire builders. The horse transformed more basic, everyday aspects of human life. Living on horseback entailed epic hunts, marathon steeplechases, and mounted contact sports that attracted enthusiastic spectators. What we now call the Silk Road should more accurately be called the Horse Road, for it was the horse, and not silk, that drew buyers and sellers together from all over Europe and Asia to form the first large-scale international trading routes. Equestrian
beauty reverberated in poetry and the visual arts. The distinctive lifestyle centered on horse breeding appears surprisingly homogeneous and persistent throughout Eurasia. Horse culture came to be admired and imitated by all the settled civilizations around the steppe, as we see in the majestic terra-cotta horses of Tang China, the exquisite niello-silver horse tack in the Moscow Kremlin treasury, and the jewel-like equestrian portraits of Indian Mughal painters.
Only when they were displaced by cars and planes did horses cease to be a strategic asset. That spelled the end for the horse-breeding culture that had thrived for four millennia. The disappearance of the horse as a centerpiece of human civilization was so sudden and complete, in fact, that the animal’s role in shaping civilization has been largely forgotten.
Indeed, given the horse’s importance across so many centuries, it is surprising that, outside of specialized literature, our history books have little to say about where horses originated, how they were domesticated, how riding come about, and, more important, why these things matter. The horse should be at the center of our inquiries into ancient state formation, the relationships between settled and steppe civilizations, and the political dynamics of horse-breeding peoples.
That so much of historical importance took place in this flat, featureless, mostly empty setting seems improbable, and yet it did.