We do not know anything about Sharahil outside of his inscription, but we do see a number of his Arabophone contemporaries playing a substantial role in the imperial armies. The superpower rivalry that began in the third century ad meant that both empires were overstretched and had desperate need to swell the ranks of their military. Men who showed that they and their followers were skilled at waging war were welcomed with open arms and could negotiate for high stipends and titles. Furthermore, whereas before, in the glory days of the
Roman Empire, “barbarians” had been separated and distributed across different units and served under an imperial commander, now they entered service as whole groups and under their own leaders. This imperial policy of seeking out strong leaders and giving them subsidies and titles led to the emergence of ever larger and more powerful groupings as chosen leaders competed with one another for power and status. There were, for example, some fifteen chiefs of the Goths when they first appeared in the west in the fourth century, but by the sixth century there were just the two major kingdoms of the Visigoths and Ostrogoths, and they wielded enough military muscle to be able to dictate their demands to the Byzantine emperor.
The rise of such kingdoms in the peripheral regions of the Byzantine and Persian Empires in the fourth to sixth century is characterized by sociologists as secondary state formation. Groups that enjoyed frequent, sustained, and intensive contact with empires begin to establish rudimentary state structures of their own. Thus in all the border regions around the Byzantine Empire we see hybrid polities emerging: Romano-Germanic kingdoms in western Europe, Romano-Moorish kingdoms in north Africa, and Romano-Arab kingdoms on the periphery of the Levant. They retained their own distinctiveness—using their own language among themselves, preserving their own styles of dress, burial rites, and other customs—but they were proud of their ties with the empire. King Masuna of Altava, in modern west Algeria, proclaimed himself “king of the peoples of the Moors and the Romans,”11 and the chiefs of the Arab tribe of Ghassan enthusiastically commissioned Arabic poetry and at the same time vaunted their imperial titles in their inscriptions and their patronage of Christianity.
In the old Chinese classification, these were “cooked” barbarians in that they had been moderated by close and prolonged interaction with the empires and adopted many of their ways. Beyond them lay barbarians who were less cooked and some who were downright raw. They, too, coveted the material riches that empires possessed, but being more distant from centers of settlement, they had less easy access to them. However, if they spotted a weakness in the imperial defenses they would seek to enrich themselves by extortion, demanding tribute and taxing trade routes. The late sixth and early seventh
Centuries presented just such an opportunity, and a number of peoples on the margins of empires seized their chance to raid the two empires. The situation was in many ways the same as had bedeviled the western half of the Roman Empire in the fifth and sixth centuries, when various “barbarian” groups carved out principalities for themselves and over time created independent kingdoms. The east had seemed immune from such depredation, since its more complex and diverse economy allowed it to pay for better defense and support a bigger army. But Byzantium and Persia's dangerous infatuation with defeating each other in the late sixth and early seventh centuries depleted their resources and left them exposed to attack.
The most powerful of these new peoples were the Turks. They had been one faction among many within a loose tribal coalition on China's northern frontier, but their khagan (chief) Bumin, with his brother Ishtemi, made a bid for power in 552 and established themselves as the new masters of this region, probably aided by the fact that China was particularly weak and disunited at this time. Subsequently they expanded westward, vanquishing in the 560s the Hephthalite (White Hun) confederation that had dominated Central Asia for the previous century. These Turks are unusual among steppe powers in that they have left us a number of inscriptions, in Sogdian and Old Turkish, which recount their exploits and ideas, including this reminiscence of an eighth-century ruler concerning the founding of his realm (Figure 1.4):
When the blue sky above and the dark earth below were fashioned, human beings were created between the two. My ancestors, the kha-gans Bumin and Ishtemi, rose above the sons of men. Having become the masters of the Turk people, they established and ruled its empire and fixed the law of the country. Many were their enemies in the four corners of the world, but, leading campaigns against them, they subjugated and pacified them, making them bow their heads and bend their knees. They pushed eastward to the forest of Qardirkhan and westward to the Iron Gate; thus far did the realm of the Turks reach. They were wise khagans, they were valiant khagans; all their officers were wise and valiant; all their nobles as well as common people were
FIGURE 1.4 Statue from Zhao Su (Mongolkure) in northwest China, depicting the khagan Nili (d. ca. 600) with a crown on his head and holding a vessel and short sword in his hands. © Soren Stark.
Just. This was why they were able to rule an empire so great, and why, governing the empire, they could uphold the law.12
By 583 the empire had split into eastern and western portions. The former, in Mongolia, primarily contended with China, engaging it in major confrontations in the late sixth and early seventh centuries. The western Turks, occupying the area from the Black Sea to Lake Issykul (in modern Kyrgyzstan), sought to challenge Persia, but two of the latter’s commanders of the eastern marches defeated them in a series of battles in the late 580s and mid-610s. Instead, the Turks sent out feelers to Byzantium, whose emperors were happy to receive such powerful aid against their archenemy and to buy the silk and other luxury goods from China that they were trading. Byzantine courtiers perhaps smiled when envoys from the khagan referred to him as “great lord of the seven races, master of the seven climes,”13 and yet it was only with the aid of the Turks that Heraclius was able to defeat the Persians in 627.
In the mid-sixth century another “barbarian” group, the Avars, began their rise to prominence. They seem to have been traveling westward from Central Asia, pushed along by the advance of the newly created Turk polity. They reached northern Caucasia in the winter of 557 and sent envoys to Constantinople, whose inhabitants marveled at their long plaited hair. The Byzantine emperor agreed to pay them a subsidy and directed them to attack various unruly elements in the Balkans. Gradually the Avars subjugated all the peoples of that region, including the Bulgars and Slavs, and raided as far afield as the river Elbe, coming into confrontation with the Franks. But this military might was soon turned against Byzantium and in 582 they conquered the strategic town of Sirmium (modern Sremska Mitrovica in Serbia). Clashes continued for many years, with the Avars most often having the upper hand, and they culminated in full-scale attacks on Constantinople itself in 619 and 626. The latter assault was particularly terrifying for the capital's residents, since it coincided with a simultaneous attack on the city by the Persians. The Byzantine navy was, however, able to stop all communication between the two enemy forces across the Bosphorus and harried the small ships of the Slav contingent. Lack of supplies and the immensity of Constantinople's encompassing walls gave rise to discontents and the siege was called off. The Avars never quite recovered their prestige, and the Slavs and Bulgars soon broke away to found their own polities.
The Avars were also constrained to the east by yet another emerging political player, the Khazars, who established themselves in the lower Volga region sometime between the 630s and 650s. They seem to have begun as a group within the Turk confederation, which was at that time coming under severe pressure from the recently established Tang dynasty in China. The Khazars' territory stretched from modern Ukraine to western Kazakhstan, and their rule lasted some three centuries (ca. 650—969), making them a particularly long-lived example of a steppe empire. The reason for their longevity was their evolution into a highly successful trans-Eurasian trade hub, connecting the northern forest zones with the Byzantine and Islamic empires. Moreover, the regime reinforced its own distinctiveness and independence by converting to Judaism in the eighth to ninth century. The Khazars were, in short, a formidable power and presented the Arabs with a serious challenge on their northern flank, especially in the period 708—37, when the two sides came together as equals and battled each other for supremacy of Caucasia.
In some ways, the rise of these peripheral peoples is a success story. By close and constant interaction with the empires they had learned to organize themselves in a more sophisticated way so that they were now capable of orchestrating major coordinated military action. They were not homogeneous entities but coalitions of numerous groups of different origins and ethnicities atop of which often sat a presiding dynasty. However, the resources that they obtained by extortion and pillage allowed them to buy loyalty, to unite fragmentary and diverse groups into more cohesive wholes, to articulate a sense of identity, and to promote their own culture. For the empires, there was a danger in this development in that some of these peoples became powerful enough to challenge them. The Persian emperor Peroz (457—84) made use of the Hephthalites of Central Asia to fight his younger brother, who had usurped the throne, but he was later to die at their hands when the relationship turned sour. A century later the Persians allied with the newly ascendant power in Central Asia, the Turks, to destroy the Hephthalite kingdom, but later the Turks struck a deal with Byzantium and reinforced the emperor Heraclius with enough troops to defeat Khusrau II. The Avars only appeared on the scene in the mid-sixth century, but they were soon able to cause the Byzantines a major headache, and their surprise attacks on Constantinople almost brought about the demise of the empire. Yet these peoples, the Arabs included, did not attack an empire in order to destroy it, despite what imperial citizens claimed; rather, they sought to appropriate some of its wealth for themselves, or even to make themselves its new masters.
World History
