Studying nomadic empires

The phrase 'nomadic empire' sounds like a contradiction. Nomads wander with their herds in family groups; an empire suggests fixed territory, complex society and an elaborate government. Yet the Mongols of Central Asia, under Genghis Khan, built a transcontinental empire stretching across Europe and Asia in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. They adapted their steppe customs into a fearsome army and a sophisticated way of governing.

The problem of sources. The steppe peoples themselves wrote very little. Most of what we know comes from chronicles, travel accounts and documents written by city-based writers, who were often ignorant of nomadic life and hostile to it.

• City people often called nomads barbarians. The word comes from the Greek barbaros, a non-Greek whose speech sounded like meaningless noise: 'bar-bar'. Greek texts pictured barbarians as childish, cruel, lazy and unable to govern themselves; the Romans used the word for Germanic tribes, Gauls and Huns.
• But the Mongols' success attracted many scholars from Buddhist, Confucian, Christian, Turkish and Muslim backgrounds. Some served Mongol rulers and wrote sympathetic accounts, even praise, which complicates the hostile picture.

Modern research. Some of the most valuable work was done by Russian scholars from the eighteenth century onwards, as the Tsars took over Central Asia. In the twentieth century, Soviet historians followed a Marxist view that saw Genghis Khan's rise as a move from a tribal to a feudal society.

• Boris Vladimirtsov did excellent research on Mongol languages, society and culture.
• Vasily Bartold wrote a positive account of Genghis Khan and his successors. Stalin's government, suspicious of regional nationalism, censored his work; it was published in full, in nine volumes, only in the 1960s.

Many languages. Because the empire was so vast, its sources are in Chinese, Mongolian, Persian and Arabic, and also Italian, Latin, French and Russian. The same text sometimes exists in two languages with different contents: the Mongolian and Chinese versions of the earliest account of Genghis Khan, The Secret History of the Mongols, differ, and the Italian and Latin versions of Marco Polo's travels do not match. Historians must also work as language experts to recover what Mongol words originally meant.