North of the Balkans lie the Hungarian plains, in a European context a huge flat expanse, but seen on a bigger scale, only a tiny outlier of the vast Eurasian steppe grasslands that stretch east more than 6000 kilometres to Lake Baikal and the Inner Asian frontiers of China. Bounded to the north by the Russian forests and to the south by seas, deserts, and mountains, the steppes are the Eurasian equivalent of the American prairies, a distinctive environment that distinctive societies have grown up to exploit—in this case Eurasian steppe nomads (Chibiliyov 2002:248-66; Taaffe 1990: 30-5; Obolensky 1971: 34-7). One need only think of such nomad empires as Attila s Huns or Genghiz Khan’s Mongols to see the significance of the steppe world.
Chinese and Persian history may be seen fundamentally in terms of the relationship between a settled empire and its nomad neighbours, with both histories being marked by nomad conquests—the most recent such conquest of China being that by the Manchus in 1644 which created the dynasty that ruled until 1911 (Barfield 1989). Byzantium’s relationship was inevitably different because the geography of that relationship was different. The Avars came closest to achieving the equivalent conquest of Byzantium by a steppe power, but leaving aside the particular reasons that led to their failure in 626, the core of Byzantium was always too distant and too alien an environment to make for easy domination. Making contact with steppe rulers usually involved leaving Constantinople by boat and heading for the northern or eastern shores of the Black Sea. One of the functions of Cherson in the Crimea was as a listening post onto the steppe world (Obolensky 1971: 28-32). By land Byzantium was always separated by either the Transcaucasus or the Balkans, in both cases buffering the empire from the steppe world.
World History
